With all the Ruby hype lately, Perl has sort of become a little bit of a green-haired child in some circles. However, the sheer utility and depth of perl makes it my favorite. It's not the sexiest nor the fastest, but it's fast enough and sexy enough.

Mostly, though, perl just gets the job done. Over and over. Day after day.

True story -- in the mid-90s, I spent a week entering 10,000 30 digit auto part numbers into an Postgres95 database. It was such a crappy job, I couldn't in good faith ask my staff to do it. So I did it on nights and weekends. Then, at 10,239 records, the database engine munged the tables and I had an unrecoverable mess. Sheer agony. I started using Oracle three weeks later.

Postgresql traces its heritage back to Postgres95 (and Open Ingres) and Berkeley (go bears!) and despite my pain in 1996, a few years ago I started messing with it again. And I fell in love.

Fast, reliable, massively flexible, rock solid, it's what a database should be. It's a database ready for any enterprise activity you have in mind.

I'm not a particularly big fan of Mysql -- I feel it lacks the juice to do really hard things (but it's easier to cluster than postgresql!) and ACID compliance matters to me. Pius, I feel Postgresql makes Oracle utterly irrelevent (and I used to like Oracle -- the database, not the company).

If you need a db, this is the one to use in my opinion.

Apache is the bomb. Nothing more to say than that.

I've been using Linux since the .92 kernel and it's been a ride well worth taking.

I feel it's almost impossible to quantify the amount of creative work GNU/Linux has permitted. And that's the name of the game with open source: spawning creativity.

I use the GNU/Linux monicker here because I feel it's accurate -- it's impossible to separate GNU software from Linux.

Emacs is pure beauty to me. I can't count how many hours I've spent with Emacs and it's still my editor of choice.

It's power is unrivaled and, while it's not the friendliest editor in the world, it will do whatever you want it to do.

Mod perl -- with HTML::Mason -- is extremely good stuff. For a long time, Amazon ran on it (I don't know if it still does). And god knows CityTools wouldn't run without this dynamic duo.

Fast. Elegant. Powerful. What's not to like? And as the libraries get richer, well, there's even more to like.

Open Office is sheer beauty and it has everything that you might want from MS Office and it's standard's compliant too.

I marvel at the fact that people still use MS Office -- it's just because of the installed base, that's for sure. OO offers everything you want from MS Office and none of the bloat. Try it an you'll see.

I used to be a True Believer in Sun. For many years. And god, Sun tormented the True Believers. If there was any crappy thing that Sun could do to it's True Believers it did it. Arrogant, bloated, stupid, Sun became an ugly thing.

And then, finally, I left like so many other True Believers. Sun lost all relevance for me for many years. To hell with Sun. Who needs those high-priced, arrogant, customer-hating morons?

Then suddenly a couple of years ago, Sun started to change. The hardware got better. Faster. It could run GNU/Linux on it. Cool. CityTools uses a number of Sun multiprocessor opteron servers. (Along with IBM and HP -- we're not bigots here...)

And then Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris arrived. It's good stuff. ZFS is better than good, it's great. In fact, I think ZFS on reliable hardware makes mid-range NetApps unnecessary.

For now, I'm not ready to use Solaris 10 in a production environment for CityTools. I'm still uncomfortable about Sun's view of customers to drink the cool-aid again.

But I'm sure digging Solaris 10 at the moment. It's close to something worthwhile again. It's very good stuff and if it becomes the perfect OS to run big Postgresql databases (and it might well be that soon) then we'll certainly begin to deploy Solaris again.

Eclipse is just too cool for words.