StoWiki/ blog/ sysadmin/ Retooling

I haven't blogged for a long time, but I've decided that I'm going to try to write again, at least about technical stuff.

My plan was to blog about the projects I've been working on lately, the main one being the setup of the latest version of Kolab with the systems we already have at work, but I'll do that on the next days.

Today I'm just going to make a list of the tools I use on a daily basis and my plans to start using additional ones in the near future.

Shells, Terminals and Text Editors

I do almost all my work on Z Shell sessions running inside tmux; for terminal emulation I use gnome-terminal on X, VX ConnectBot on Android systems and iTerm2 on Mac OS X.

For text editing I've been using Vim for a long time (even on Mobile devices) and while I'm aware I don't know half of the things it can do, what I know is good enough for my day to day needs.

In the past I also used Emacs as a programming editor and my main tool to write HTML, SGML and XML, but since I haven't really needed an IDE for a long time and I mainly use Lightweight Markup Languages I haven't used it for a long time (I briefly tried to use Org mode, but for some reason I ended up leaving it).

Documentation formats and tools

Since a long time ago I've been an advocate of Lightweight Markup Languages; I started to use LaTeX and Lout, then moved to SGML/XML formats (LinuxDoc and DocBook) and finally moved to plain text based formats.

I started using Wiki formats (parsewiki) and soon moved to reStructuredText; I also use other markup languages like Markdown (for this blog, aka ikiwiki) and tried MultiMarkdown to replace reStructuredText for general use, but as I never liked Markdown syntax I didn't liked an extended version of it.

While I've been using ReStructuredText for a long time, I recently found Asciidoctor and the Asciidoc format and I guess I'll be using it instead of rst whenever I can (I still need to try the slide backends and conversions to ODT, but if that works I guess I'll write all my new documents using Asciidoc).

Programming languages

I'm not a developer, but I read and patch a lot of free software code written on a lot of different programming languages (I wouldn't be able to write whole programs on most of them, but thanks to Stack Overflow I'm usually able to fix what I need).

Anyway, I'm able to program in some languages; I write a lot of shell scripts and I go for Python and C when I need something more complicated.

On the near future I plan to read about javascript programming and nodejs (I'll probably need it at work) and I already started looking at Haskell (I guess it was time to learn about functional programming and after reading about it, it looks like haskell is the way to go for me).

Version Control

For a long time I've been a Subversion user, at least for my own projects, but seems that everything has moved to git now and I finally started to use it (I even opened a github account) and plan to move all my personal subversion repositories at home and at work to git, including the move of all my debian packages from svn-buildpackage to git-buildpackage.

Further Reading

With the previous plans in mind, I've started reading a couple of interesting books:

Now I just need to get enough time to finish reading them ... ;)