I was just browsing Reddit, and saw a discussion about people’s favorite smells.  Unfortunately, it looks like my favorite smell is also the overwhelming winner on Reddit.  I don’t know if I should be happy, or if I should be sad that my favorite smell seems to be a lot less original than I thought.

My favorite smell is the smell of dust kicked off the ground by the rain in the spring. Apparently Petrichor – the “Smell of Rain” is caused by Geosmin, the organic chemical compound that causes the smell.  Hooray, the collective intelligence of the Internet saves the day again!

• RT @tweetmeme Lady Gaga lyrics – as read by Christopher Walken – Holy Kaw! http://is.gd/6zbT5 #

I’ve recently had to copy my development environment over to a new MacBook due to the fact that my old one developed severe wear and “shut down at random times by prompting me and assuming I said Yes to the shutdown prompt with any keystroke”-disorder.  Yes, sad, but I do put my laptops through a completely unreasonable endurance test called “Ivan’s regular laptop use regimen”.  In any case, that’s not the point, the point is that I’ve discovered several new bits of software that I think are just damn excellent.  Here’s the list:

muCommander – a Norton Commander / Midnight Commander file manager for OS X, Windows and just about every other platform.  Excellent because its configurable with your own edit and view commands, supports sftp, smb and nfs remote file management, and other nifty features.

Versions – an excellent SVN client for OS X.  Its got a really beautiful timeline view.  Doesn’t really replace my habitual use of the svn command-line client, but its nice for keeping track of / digging into repositories you didn’t nurse from revision zero to now.

Prism – a new addition to the Mozilla family, this little gem lets you package web apps into a browser-less desktop app experience.  Quite nice for wrapping a website you use frequently into something more app-like that you can use independently of whatever you’re browsing at the time.

And this is of course in addition to the previously indespensable:

TextMate – I just love this editor for OS X – I’ve grown quite comfortable with it, and it supplements the command-line vim experience quite nicely.  Not too heavy-handed, not too slim on features.  I just wish it had code completion learned from a particular project’s codebase.  I guess I’m just spoiled since I’ve used MS Visual DevStudio for far too long and its far too nice for .NET development in that sense (code completion/refactoring/etc).

TaskPaper – the indespensable tasklist as plain text file, marked up with added functionality. Its equivalent for Windows is ToDoPaper.

QuickSilver – Spotlight without the lag and with so much extra functionality it could almost be called a Finder replacement in itself.

SynergyKM – keyboard and screen sharing over the network.  This lets me connect to my old MacBook remotely without having to touch it (and possibly accidentally shut it down lol).  Quite the tool, includes clipboard sharing, has clients for just about every platform, and this particular wrapper to synergyd for OS X actually makes it easy to use and configure.

Am I missing anything essential?

Using Mac OS X as my primary development platform is great since I can emulate my LAMP production environment a lot closely than I ever could developing on Windows.  One thing I missed for a while is being able to load the CHM (Compiled Help format used on Windows) manuals for PHP and MySQL quickly and easily (especially for those great disconnected development sessions while traveling when looking at the online documentation is not an option).

However, today I finally went searching and discovered several CHM viewers for Mac OS X.

Chmox does a pretty decent job, but the search function wasn’t working for me.

Another option is xCHM with a Mac OS X version available on VersionTracker.  It has the Search functionality and looks pretty much like the Windows CHM Viewer, but is slower and for some really bizarre reason, xCHM only lets you load a single CHM file at a time.

iCHM is a an all-around good app, and has a pretty nice tabbed viewing feature, but didn’t seem to be compabile with PHP’s CHM manual (the searching didn’t work) – worked fine with the MySQL CHM manual though.

Finally, there’s ArCHMock which is fast, has a decent search function, and seems to be the winner at least for my needs.

Now I have my CHM files happily sitting on the desktop.  The trip home for Thanksgiving will now be productive, unless the train is so packed that I don’t have room to take out my laptop. :-/

• RT @GuyKawasaki Fast Food Flowchart http://om.ly/cRPj — makes me want an In-n-Out burger lol #