| Category | Favorite tool | Others that I've tried | Reasons | Disadvantages of my favorite | Notes | |
| Operating system | GNU/Linux | Windows | Open source | Harder to use | A friend of mine who is not a computer guy uses Ubuntu with no probs | |
| GNU/Linux distro | Ubuntu | Debian | Popular, desktop-user oriented | I don't like the upcoming Unity interface | Debian is better for servers | |
| Text editor | emacs | vi, Word, pico, nano, joe | More features | Default keybindings are really bad, though; use ergoemacs and viperre, "hacky" | | |
| Programming language | python | C, C++, Perl, Java, Haskell, Pascal, Basic, others | Rather powerful, concise, readable, medium-sized, memory-managed | Supposedly not as powerful as some other more functional languages; not as usable for small scripts as Perl | I've never tried Lisp, and though I've tried Haskell and so far prefer Python, I haven't tried Haskell very much yet | |
| Unix shell | bash | csh, zsh | More featureful/shortcutty than csh; more developer momentum than zsh | | May switch to zsh once I learned it. Didn't like zsh's out-of-box completion behavior, but I assume there's a way to change that. | |
| Python Web framework | pyramid | Django | Python; more decoupled than Django | Not as popular as Django | | |
| Scientific computing | python scipy | matlab, octave | Open source | sometimes you have to jump thru hoops to convert between lists and arrays, or to flatten and unflatten arrays | | |
| Version control (also called revision control) | mercurial ("hg") | cvs, svn | decentralized, easy to use | | i liked darcs, but heard that it does not scale well; also, it is not as popular. heard that git has inelegant, hard to learn syntax | |
| Remote mounting | sshfs | | | | don't use it much right now due to some sort of timeout issue | |
| Wiki | Hatta | Oddmuse, Mediawiki, usemod, a few others | Mercurial backend | Not very featureful | Oddmuse is better for many use-cases | |
| Computer | Fujitsu T580 | Dell Inspiron 8000, Lenovo x61t, others | | | | |
| Webhost | Nearly Free Speech | |
| Virtual private server (VPS) host | VpsVillage? | | cheap | | will prob. switch to linode or slicehost someday | |
| Slideshow program | qiv | | | | | |
| Document preparation | EasyLatex? (lightweight latex markup; a preprocessor for latex) | Latex, Word | Lightweight, power of latex, i like semantic markup | unpopular (i wrote it) | | |
| Latex slide package | Beamer | seminar | better maintained than seminar, also more featureful | Annoying to make it do unordered lists indented in the usual way | EasyLatex? supports Beamer | |
| Graph visualization library | graphviz | | | | | |
| Machine learning framework | scipy | Orange, Weka | it's python | | | |
| Slideshow creation | pandoc | | | | | |
| News website | Nytimes, Economist one-page weekly summaries (they have a political and economic subsection) | Various | Free, the Economist is the only publication I know of that provides concise, comprehensive weekly summaries of the news | | I try to glance at Nytimes for domestic news that wouldn't be important enough for Economist to mention, or for breaking news that I should know about immediately, but then I get sucked in. I should spend less time reading Nytimes | |
| Tech news website | http://hnrecap.com/monthly/ | Slashdot, Digg, Plastic, kuroshin, Hacker news, Reddit | Reddit is also good for programming stuff, but worse for general computer news; Hacker news prime is good, but too much traffic; Digg is poor, plastic and kuroshin miss a lot of interesting tech stories; i love slashdot, but it's way too much traffic; if you only look at it a few times a month, you'll miss a lot; there's no way to get only the "top ten stories of the month ". If you read /., Only read /. comments if the issue is really important to you, since it takes a lot of time to read them; and don't trust them too much | | |
| Calendaring website | calendar.google.com | | Easy to use, Android widget available | | | |
| Smartphone OS | Android | | | | |
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