… the obvious is looking you in the eye.

All this time I’ve been trying every IDE and text-editor I could beg, borrow or steal and, as someone somewhere said, they all suck, but they suck in different ways. And there, every time I edited a linux config file, was a really rather good tool – gEdit, the default Ubuntu text editor. With a bunch of plugins it becomes quite a tasty IDE for web work. Time will tell, but for now it’s working well – oh, and it’s FAST!

Or, why we’ll all be using Linux soon

Two of us run this outfit – Rob and me. Rob is the visuals guy, a designer to his bones, so naturally he uses a Mac and an iPhone and has ‘Cupertino’ running through him like the name of our city runs through a stick of rock.

I’m the geek, the code-monkey, so naturally, every 6 months or so I surrender to my impulses and load up a Linux distro, dust off my command-line chops and try to expunge the odour of downtown Redmond from my nostrils. (more…)

In which Quantum DB is persuaded to play nicely with WordPress tables

Quantum DB is a very useful plugin for Eclipse (or Aptana Studio, which is what I use) which allows you to view and manipulate databases. Having this built in to the IDE obviates the need to have yet another application cluttering your development desktop.

To get it to work with the MySql databases most commonly used in PHP development you just need to download the MySql driver, unpack it and pop it into a suitable directory. Then, each time you create a new connection, you specify this driver as the one to use. (more…)