My Little World

The most basic software development setup I can live with at work requires these four things: Microsoft Office, LabView, TextPad, and Strawberry Perl with PDL. If I could not have anything else installed, I would at least need these four packages to do the data analysis and hardware programming development that is the bread and butter of my job. Lately I've been experimenting with different variations of this setup. Our machines at work are slowly being upgraded, so I have machines ranging from Windows XP to Windows 10 at work right now, and everything in between (Except Vista, thankfully).

So there is this markup language called Markdown out there now. Github uses it for people to post documentation about their code projects. I think writers from all backgrounds and fields are using it for blogging and writing their novels in. That's what got me interested in it. A clean looking plain text markup language that allows me to emphasize text and maintain basic formatting without having to resort to a big bad word processor. I really like that idea and I'm really glad it's just so darn easy to learn too!

I really like doing my writing with a text editor instead of a word processor. They just load up so much faster on my ancient computers, and there is just fewer things to distract me when I want to write code or freewrite. Plus editors like TextPad and Vim are just so stable. I have yet to see TextPad crash on me, no matter how huge a file I try to load with it. It's amazing for that, and I'm glad the developers have not messed that up yet.