Behind the Scenes - Mark Paschal

Behind The Scenes is a new series where we here at Six Apart discuss what tools (software, technology, etc.) we use to do our work.

Hi, I'm Mark Paschal, a software engineer here at Six Apart. You may know me as markpasc from the MT Support Forum. Here I'll share some of the tools I use in my development work, as well as some of the intranet tools I had a hand in setting up here at the company.

I use putty to connect to our development machines, the main one of which runs Debian Linux. With putty I use screen to open whatever shell-based tools I need open at the same time. I hope it won't damage my geek cred too much to admit that, before I came to Six Apart, my default UNIX text editor was nano. While I started using vim since then, I still don't feel as adept with it as I am with TextPad, my favorite Windows editor. TextPad has built-in Find In Files and File Compare (that is, grep and diff), complete regular expression support, and passable syntax highlighting.

I use Trillian Pro for IM. I wanted to write a Rendezvous iChat plugin for it, but that's not so pressing now that we're using an internal IRC server. I had been using a Windows theme called Watercolor--the same theme Trillian Pro mimics--until I upgraded to SP1, which "fixed" the unsigned themes hack I was using. Fortunately Michael Sippey uses the same theme and accidentally showed it off at a meeting, so I found out StyleXP still works with both SP1 and SP2! Watercolor is actually a Microsoft theme that was in preview versions of "Whistler" (Windows XP), but they took it out before release for some reason I can't remotely fathom. It's so much prettier than the Windows Classic theme without being nearly as Crayola as the regular XP style.

On our intranet, we naturally have a Movable Type install for everyone at the company. I wrote a script to make it easy to add accounts and blogs for new people, and we're growing enough that it's already paid off! I also wrote a tiny kludgy plugin to list entries from all the blogs on the install; nowadays I would just set up David Raynes' MultiBlog, a plugin contest winner, or Stepan Riha's GlobalListings to do the same thing. For our internal IRC server we have a slightly hacked-on version of this IRC logging bot, which comes in handy when I narrate our company meetings to IRC for our employees not in the San Mateo office.

We also have a wiki for collaborative notetaking and discussion. After a few days of people saying, "You know, we should really have a wiki!" I set up PurpleWiki, which is based on UseMod. I liked the idea of having a permalink on every paragraph, but that feature didn't catch on and we haven't used it much. On the other hand, we use the wiki itself every day. Thanks to some work on a conversion script by Brad Choate, we should be switching to Kwiki soon; Kwiki has a plugin for uploading and attaching files to pages, which will be useful for attaching images and documents directly instead of having to put them somewhere else and link them in. Hopefully that will be as helpful as it sounds. Kwiki also has Atom support.

I hope that gives you some ideas for tools to use in your work. Thanks for reading!