I was watching an episode of Chuck called “Chuck vs. Operation Awesome“.  Besides the silly humor and marginally interesting plot, the show has some REALLY great music.  The theme for the show is Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” – the extremely contagious instrumental track for it that is, with some sound effects – here’s the video for the Chuck Theme song.  The first episode I ever watched had an extremely excellent placement of Foux Du Fa Fa by Flight of the Concords.  In any case, recently while watching the “Chuck vs. Operation Awesome” episode with my brother Konst, he got intrigued because one of the songs sounded “really familiar”.  So after some on-and-off googling, I figured out that it was “Space Monkeys” by the Dust Brothers.  Its on the Fight Club soundtrack, which explains why it was played during the “Fight Club” scenes in that particular Chuck episode.  Here’s a pretty funny home-made video for the song.

Anyway, that’s not the point.  While re-watching the episode, another song caught my ear.  I did my standard google for the lyrics strategy.  After googling for “when i’m with you all my brothers know” and coming up with nothing, then running a bunch more searches for other portions of the song I could figure out from the episode, and coming up with more nothing, I found a site that lists the songs used in Chuck episodes.  I think its pretty ironic that after getting so much nothing from google, the song I was looking for is called “Got Nuffin”.   Here is Got Nuffin by Spoon on YouTube.  And here are the lyrics:

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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!

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. :-/

My brother Konstantin has been working on a BlackBerry app for NextJump’s Overwhelming Offers site.  Looks like the app got some press coverage today, on PCMag’s TechSaver site.  Way to go Konst, too bad the article doesn’t mention all the hours you’ve poured into that application.  Oh well, the developers behind the product rarely get mentioned

For those of you who don’t know, OverWhelming offers has daily offers of 50% off or more every Monday through Friday at noon (and some days more than one offer per day).  Definitely check it out for holiday shopping if you haven’t already.  Here’s a tidbit from a press release NextJump did for the app:

Every Monday through Friday at Noon (Eastern Daylight Time), OverwhelmingOffers.com posts one extraordinary offer from Next Jump’s more than 28,000 well-known retail and brand partners. However, on occasion, OverwhelmingOffers.com will surprise shoppers with “Super OO Days” where multiple offers are featured, such as 11 OOs this past November 11. Next Jump is planning many more Super OO Days in November and December. Shoppers can get a hint as to the day’s OO – such as “Mii+Mii=…” (Answer: Wii) – or they can sign up to get a sneak peek in advance via a daily email.

Funny, back when Konstantin was working on the actual OO site, he use to have to write those hints.  Anyways, Kudos to Konst for the app getting mentioned.