Since I use XEmacs quite a lot, I've written a small amount of Emacs-Lisp to make life easier, or more fun, or something.
If you're playing with Directory Services, and need a command line tool to quickly twiddle directory attributes, this one's for you - I hacked it up in Perl back in 1997, using the Net::LDAPapi library, and it was included as a contributed script in the last release of the library.
Note : PerLDAP has superseded
Net::LDAPapi. The PerLDAP distribution contains a utility
called modattr.pl in the examples/
subdirectory - this has similar functionality to my script.
lma (ldap_mod_attr) was last changed on 2004-04-19.
If you use goofey,
here's a nice front-end to goofey -w that
highlights people on your watch list, and other cool stuff. You
can put a list of people in ~/.goofey_extrawatch,
for people you want it to highlight, but don't want to watch -
this was the reason for its existence, as I felt that having 170
people on my watch list (circa 1996) was a bit excessive.
gon was last changed on 2004-04-19.
I currently run Debian Linux, which (for the time being) seems to be the most well-thought-out Linux distribution available. Linux is fun to use. I don't see it as the be-all and end-all of Operating System development, though, and I fully expect to be using something better in some years time - maybe it'll be the Hurd or maybe it'll something that doesn't exist yet. I don't know, and I don't really care, as long as it's fun. I don't tend to hang around the linux scene quite as much as I used to, though - there seem to be too many people who just don't get it, and really should have read this.
For Mail and News, I'm quite fond of Gnus (along with the BBDB), running under XEmacs. This doesn't, however, mean that I have some sort of silly and meaningless hatred for vi - on the contrary, I use VIM a fair bit too. It goes without saying that I rely heavily on procmail to sort my mail. Up until recently, I stored my mail in MH folders, which meant I could read my mail at the command line or within Gnus. Since I left Monash I read my mail exclusively via IMAP.
My shell of choice is zsh, which has heaps of nifty functionality that I used to spend a lot of time fiddling with, but haven't in ages.
I'm extremely attached to iScreen, which does a wonderful job of keeping all my terminal sessions gathered together - I can reconnect to the same session from different locations (eg. home and work), which is all very convenient.
For a desktop environment, I've used all sorts of things in my time, from VTWM (as the first step up from TWM), through FVWM, WindowMaker, Sawfish, and for now I've settled with KDE, which I personally find a bit less annoying than GNOME. However, I don't seem to find myself using many KDE apps, apart from KOrganizer, and there's still quite a few GTK+ apps on my desktop (GAIM, Gabber, GKrellm, XMMS). Eterm is my terminal emulator - it's hard to find one that really feels right, but this'll do for now.
For all my IM needs, I've been quite happy with GAIM which is a nice multi-protocol client - if the Big Nasties weren't blocking the Jabber servers, I'd probably be using Jabber (and hence Gabber) for everything, though. I did one or two small additions to Chris Sperandio's GAIM plugin that uses the XOSD libary to tell you people have just logged in or out.
Whilst I wrote my own code for the journal in PHP (previously ePerl), I experimented with Movable Type, and my blog basically started as a way of playing with it.