So I've had a week of classes back at school and it has been an enjoyable experience overall. I like all of my teachers, and I got into classes I wanted to. I also still have perfect attendance and a perfect grade in all classes. Easy to say so early on in the semester, but I like to celebrate success at every possible stop I get. College is an experience that is hard to comprehend while you are there. I like to think that I have a good perspective on what I am going through, but it's hard to say without looking back on this experience in 20 years. It's not like high school where people get a lot of fanfare for completing successfully. Graduating seniors throw parties, sure, but there are a countless number of friends I have met and missed in the last 3 years that I will never see again. High School graduation sucked when you thought that you would have no chance to ever meet up with these kids again. I've seen most of the people I cared about after high school. College is totally different. People leave, move to France, get married, and leave no trace behind. Facebook obviously gives us a way to stay in touch in that superficial internet way, but it's not gonna let you hang out again.

Enough emo-tastic-ness for now.

What I'd really like to talk about are some alternative pieces of software I currently use, and have changed the way I use linux.

First I would like to talk about fdm. It is a replacement for fetchmail and procmail that doesn't suck. Plus using the new 0.8 release, you can have some pretty cool general mailbox rules. Case: You add yourself to a new mailing list. With fetchmail and procmail you'd have to add new rules ( even though phrakture has a hack to do it, it's ugly ). With fdm you can just use a matching rule and use the matched text as the folder to put the mail into. Dynamically created mailboxes! Did I mention that fdm has sane syntax? Yea, I didn't think I'd find something like this either.

Next up is Mutt-NG. I could talk for hours about it, but check out my config over at http://hg.codemac.net for it, and you'll eventually grasp the power.

Weechat is a very extensible chat client. It has a beautiful plugin structure, and has sane defaults. You don't have to configure it to the end of time just to get something usable. Nick colors, nick lists, etc.. are built in. The way irc should be.

Speaking of weechat, I use Bitlbee for aim, jabber, msn, etc. It is an irc server you run locally, connect to with your irc client, and sign on aim through your irc client. It is very similar to jabber gateways.
This has taken me from 3 chat clients ( one for jabber, one for aim, one for irc ) and brought them together into one client that's text based.

Why would I want text based? Because of GNU screen. Screen is a terminal emulator. Think of it as a terminal with tabs. The coolest part is you can "detach". Detaching is a way of placing the entire screen session into a background process. You can even log out of the machine and the screen session will persist. Think of this in terms of the permanent away messages most of us keep up on AIM these days. I can sign onto AIM with bitlbee, detach and logout of my machine all while staying logged into AIM + irc + etc. Ahh the power of screen. No more signing out of irc just to restart X.

One more app in my refusal to by stuck in X is MusicPD or "mpd". It's a background daemon that plays music. Thus you can log out, log in, start X, stop X, and your playlist will stay going. Another common use is to have a headless server sitting in the living room plugged into your stereo, and then clients can connect remotely to change what is playing. The clients available are many and varied. My favorites are ncmpc and Sonata. Go set it up and be happy.

Now for my favorite revision control system.... __MERCURIAL__! Sorry, I really like it :) It's a distributed rcs that rocks my world. I've tried using darcs and bazaar, but neither were fast enough for personal use, and not enough features like Mq and bisect like mercurial has. Try mercurial, you wont be disappointed.

Clearly not everyone is going to like the same thing I use. But what's significant to this is that for everything I listed here, there is an alternative. None of these are standard, and none need to. This is what keeps me using linux over Mac OS X. I just like programming and customizing to much to be forced into one way of operating. Also I am extremely keyboard centric. I hate using my mouse. You basically can't get a good workflow on Windows or Mac OS X. Especially on Windows. At least in Mac OS X most of the apps I listed here you can port over using Terminal.app, but Windows? Forget it.

The moral of our story? Open standards, open source, open choice :)