Alfreido's Blog

A mate of mine asked me last night on MSN which operating system I prefer the most - considering that I use Linux at work (openSUSE 10.3 to be exact) at work and I use Windows XP at home (with Vista only a dual-boot away). I also own a MacBook Pro - unsurprisingly bundled with Macintosh OS X 10.5. Do you want to know my opinion? I hate them all equally, cos they all bring a case of FAIL in different areas:

Linux shits me because there is no solidarity in the community. Instead of all working together to create a kick-ass OS which shits all over Apple and Microsoft, they all decide to segregate and work on their own OS software. It also shits me that even the OS software directed towards absolute computer noobs still require some soft of computing expertise with Linux (I am not one of these noobs, but I digress).

Macintosh shits me because Apple insist on using their own standards and being a big supporter of copy protection software. Instead of using tried-and-tested standards for various things like audio and video, Apple force people to do things their way or hit the highway.

Windows shits me because Microsoft - even after numerous patches and service packs - hardly ever fix the bugs that actually matter, and usually instead throw in several products and features that hardly anyone use. Windows also shits me considering how much memory it insists on using (especially Vista) just to bloody run - and you’re expected to have your programs fit into the 5% of memory not being used. Tried running games on that? It fucking sucks.

So… you won’t be getting any recommendation from me. I’ll let the fanboys give you their opinion. Have fun decoding that clusterfuck.

I switched over to Linux at work recently, mostly due to our servers running on Linux and the opportunity of directly interfacing with the servers made my job a hell of a lot easier. No longer being able to use my trusty Macromedia Dreamweaver to do my work, I had to try out a couple of different PHP development solutions until I found the one that was right for me and could keep up with me.

And the winner is… VIM.

After playing around with software which promised the world, some which didn’t deliver, I grew to like the hidden simplicity of VIM. The development team leader at my work urged me to work with VIM, as it was the most simple and yet most powerful system to develop PHP with, and after so many functional but flawed pieces of PHP software, I’m inclined to agree with him. Here’s a couple of different PHP development solutions I tested in my search for a PHP editor and the pros and cons of each that I found. It should be noted that in each time, I fell back to VIM to complete my work when the PHP software was fighting with me to keep me from doing my work. Read more »