Decaflon

I'd recommend GTK over Qt, which is all I've played with, I don't do much Linux development though.

Something sort of related that I couldn't live without...I wrote a program that lets me apply a series of regular expression replacements to bodies of text so that I can easily mass transform any data that I need to. I'm sure there are other programs out there that do something similar, but its incredibly useful.

[JavaScript] Search an unknown API that is too large to browse in Firebug and may have undocumented features:
(function(obj, like) { var re = new RegExp(like, 'i'); for (var prop in obj) if (prop.match(re)) console.log(prop, obj[prop]); })(someControl, 'resize');

I don't go there regularly, but EE does come up a lot when searching for obscure developer issues. A nice trick is that if you pull up the Google cache for any EE page, you will get the full content of the page without paying for it. I'd agree with Oli though, its not as good as it used to be.

If you're looking to ask questions, then I'm not aware of many places (I can usually find the answer if I'm having trouble with something).

I usually stick with Google. Digg has a lot of good tech content, but for the most part whenever I search on Digg I get way too many irrelevant results for their search feature to be useful. I wish that you could filter by number of diggs (say more than 20) rather than front page vs not front page (some articles I've seen on the front page get demoted). Also, Digg is an extremely biased site (Apple, open source, etc) which doesn't usually match up with what I'm looking for except for when looking for a list of minimalistic open source freeware apps (not often).

I think the common consensus is that Fireworks is more popular than Photoshop among the multi-discipline (both coder and designer) people. I'm a big fan of Illustrator and vector art but Photoshop has always seemed a bit overkill for what I'm usually working on, think I'll have to try out Fireworks as well. Maybe I can kill two birds with one stone.

@chapstick
I'd say that the Safari text rendering is smoother, my problem with it is that in Safari/OS X, there is no such thing as normal text. Its either bold or more bold.

@Johnny
Ironically, I've switched off of Firefox due to its lack of speed. ;-)

When I'm on Windows - I use Opera because it is faster and lighter weight than Firefox or IE. IE8 is pretty slick though (love Activities and WebSlices), and Firefox 3 supposedly fixes its existing speed problems and hopefully memory leaks.

When I'm on OS X - I use Safari + WebKit nightly because WebKit is the fastest engine out there.

I'm big on lightweight, minimalistic, and extremely quick apps. Optimally, I would like to use Safari + WebKit nightly on Windows but it ruins my flow because it doesn't follow Windows UI norms, the main culprits being not using ClearType (supported in nightlies via XML config) and the UI looks like a Mac app instead of a Windows app which makes it feel out of place.

Make sure that you specify the 10 radix for parseInt, i.e. parseInt("37", 10) otherwise it might parse incorrectly.

If you want lightweight, but still want an MVC architecture, try out CodeIgniter (the framework that powers Expression Engine). The entire framework is built in order to be as lean and fast as possible.

It definitely depends on what you're working on. Generally, learning C# or Java (or both) are the most valuable since both of them can be applied towards pretty much any type of software project.

The scope of Ruby and Python in comparison is a bit limited. Ruby and Python are both great and fun languages (I already learned Ruby and I'm teaching myself Python at the moment), but I wouldn't jump into those first solely because the job market for those languages is fairly small (mostly hobbyists and startups). Also, the "documentation" for Ruby and Rails is pretty terrible which is the main reason I hardly ever use it.

If deciding to learn C# or Java first, I would look at the kind of positions that are available where you live. C#/.NET is more popular in the midwest while Java is more popular on the west coast. I prefer C#/.NET because its the better designed language/technology of the two. Once you learn one language, its pretty easy to learn the other because much of the syntax is similar. C# might be easier coming from a C/C++ background though because some of Java's syntax is obscure.

@Gomeler
No, you DEFINITELY need to put it in the footer. The Mint JS is dynamically generated so that makes it take even longer (although I assume it caches the latest version). Honestly, you should move all of your JavaScript to the end of your document for speed anyways so that it doesn't block the loading of the rest of your site.

A better solution might be to just have all of your HTML in the HTML itself and then just have a dynamic class on your parent "entry" element, handling the hiding and changing styles with CSS.

Something like the following: pastebin (css/js/html all included)

@daxgti
Mint ran pretty well on my old host actually, but on MT, you need to keep your database connections at a minimum (unless you pay for a MySQL container) in order to keep your site fast. Its pretty shady on MT's part, I wouldn't blame Mint for it, but it makes Mint pretty much unusable on an MT account.

The only reasons I'm still using MT is that I really like their control panel's interface and a VPS is too expensive for my current needs.

Mint is pretty slick, but I think that it is too resource intensive to be worth using. I am still running Mint, but I'm going to switch to Google Analytics when I get around to taking my sites more seriously - Mint makes my websites slower and that is unacceptable when there's so many solutions out there that are virtually transparent (like Analytics).

Another reason though is because unoptimized MySQL slows down websites on MediaTemple's GridServer (where I'm hosted) like nothing else, and Mint (atleast with plugins installed) is pretty poor with that.

Definitely the snap previews and any flash ads (sound or not). Snap previews are obtrusive and the flash ads eat a ton of cpu. I switched from Firefox to Opera now, so I'm missing AdBlock Plus for flash ads (I'm sure there's an alternative though).

The only other thing I can think of is websites with pure white text (#fff) on a pure black background (#000). I have sensitive eyes and the contrast difference makes me go blind if I read more than a paragraph. I always have to change the CSS manually on sites like that.

For me, I use mostly JavaScript, C#/ASP/.NET, PHP, and to a lesser extent Ruby and Java. Ruby is a bit overrated, but its pretty fun to use. I had to write a few Perl scripts at my last job, but that was because of the requirements (needed to keep our install size as small and with as little resource usage as possible - used with medical devices in mission critical applications).

Too bad Brainf*ck was already taken. ;-)

I agree with you that oldschool demos are pretty sweet. I still write programs in Assembly sometimes just because its challenging and rewarding. But given that C#/.NET (with a performance hit that is negligible in most cases with modern machines like you've mentioned) have been around for over five years now, I'm just surprised that Apple is still holding on to the old tech (perhaps waiting for Microsoft to expand on their Silverlight offering and do their work for them? ;).

There's Cocoa wrappers for other languages, including C# with Mono. Most likely though, you'd be using Objective-C (yay for 20 year old outdated development technologies). I never programmed any Cocoa apps yet, I'm too spoiled by C# and never got around to trying it under Mono.

XSL is powerful, but man is it ever a pain in the ass. I'd say CSS just because I've had friendlier experiences with it (other than IE6 of course). But as was mentioned, this isn't really a fair comparison because they're not competitive technologies.

Any site that I frequent regularly, I would like this option...otherwise saved passwords is usually fine with me. Anything where money is involved shouldn't though.

You've got to take into consideration with this number that Microsoft also becomes the exclusive advertising partner on Facebook...so I wouldn't put it as high as $15 billion. No matter how you look at it though, its a pretty large investment for such a small stake, but $240 million is a pretty negligible amount for Microsoft. Besides, that 1.6% could turn out to be worth a lot in the long run if Facebook stays independent and goes public.

Honestly, many of the products/software that have come out of Microsoft in the past five years have been gold. Highlights include: Visual Studio, C# and .NET, Silverlight, Office 2007, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox Live, Zune (for something that only took 6 months from start to finish, its a pretty nice piece of work). Vista is unfortunately a bit off the mark (but has a better UI than OS X imo), once SP1 hits and the drivers get better it should be fine though. I have a MacBook Pro and and iPod so I am by no means against Apple, but it is Microsoft products that make the most difference in my life.

@jackosh
Macs do assume that you're an idiot. Thats one of the reasons I switched back to Windows as my main OS after using my Mac for 6 months.

OS X - Assumes you're a moron and that the only thing you should be given is plastic scissors so that you can't hurt yourself.
Windows - It might not be as easy to do things, but you can do more (and lower level) things and do them faster.
Linux - Terrible user experience but powerful as shit (<3 Linux but I'd never use it for anything more than a playground or server).

Vista if (and only if) you're computer is good enough to make up for the performance bumps. I prefer it to XP (except for games, but after I disabled vsync, my games performance is comparable).

For IM: Miranda on Windows, Adium on OS X, Pidgin on Linux
For IRC: mIRC on Windows, Linkinus on OS X
Meebo when I don't feel like installing anything.

@dynamic
I used HomeSite back when it was Allaire HomeSite and also used Dreamweaver in the HomeSite view after Macromedia/Adobe bought them. Since then I've scaled back to lighter weight text editors. For anything that isn't .NET, I use e text editor (Windows TextMate clone) now. E is a bit buggy but its still probably the best editor on Windows. Ironically, I never much cared for TextMate on my Mac (just don't like how its organized).

@Oli

I've done quite a bit of ASP.NET (1.0/1.1/2.0) work and in general practice, its never *seemed* as fast as a proper PHP environment. Granted, I haven't done any low level tests like you've mentioned - but I've even had ASP.NET apps running on dedicated servers and the speed on a shared PHP still *seems* much faster.

Anyways...the point is, PHP isn't slow, thats up to the programmer. None of the server-side technologies are slow if you optimize their environments properly, even Ruby on Rails.

I usually use Mootools, primarily because of how clean and well-written the source code is. That said, jQuery is very powerful and probably just as slim but I tend not to use it because the source code is ugly and inconsistent.

The first library I used was Prototype, but from there I moved Mootools because I love how lightweight and clean the code is. Mootools is what I currently use the most, but I have started testing out jQuery and Ext. Ext is pretty slick but its kind of difficult to find what I'm looking for sometimes in the docs. jQuery I've never been a fan of mainly because the source code is pretty ugly, but the design of it is well done and is what interests me. YUI is actually a pretty good library, but something I'd only use for large-scale projects. The benefit of YUI is the level of quality of its documentation.

ColdFusion is still in, but its a pretty small and quiet circle compared to other technologies.

I used Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails by The Pragmatic Programmers to teach myself Ruby and Rails. They are both pretty good books and it actually should be a bit easier for you to pick up a unique language like Ruby than most people since you don't have much development experience. What I mean is that if you came from a C/C++/C#/Java/PHP/any normal language background, Ruby can be difficult to pick up because it uses obscure syntax and structures.

Be warned: Reference material/API documentation for Ruby and Rails is extremely poor compared to other technologies.

Oh yeah, that reminds me...any page with Flash (especially a Flash video combined with Flash ads) on it just lags up Firefox. I think thats more of a Flash problem then a Firefox problem though.

It all depends on the amount of extensions that you have installed. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to set up a Portable Firefox instance for web development and such (I'll just deal with my slow browser because I like using my extensions to inspect/research random websites as I browse).

MediaTemple is my current host. They're alright, but I don't think that it really lives up to my expectations (server response time can be a bit slow, I got one of the GridServer accounts). On the other hand, all of their services are pretty well done and well organized, as well as that their customer service seems to be pretty good.