Current mood:	geeky
Current music:	Wolfsheim - The Sparrows and the Nightingales
Entry tags:	geek, writer's block

Writer's Block: Tools of My Trade

A full answer would probably too long to fit into this margin journal, but for anyone who's curious, here are a few of the interesting ones:

• Firebug. It's an amazingly useful tool for web development of any kind. You can press "Inspect", click on part of the page, and see it in the document source (and vice versa by hovering parts of source); you can see which bits of CSS actually apply to that element; you can temporarily edit CSS on the fly for an instant "what if?"; you can see how long individual objects take to load. If you're using JavaScript, it'll give you a good debugger and an easy way to browse the DOM. It's all nicely integrated, too. You can put an expression in the console that evaluates to a page element, and then do things to that element as if it was in the source view, or jump to it in the source view.
• Wireshark. No surprises there, it's "the world's foremost network protocol analyser". Seeing what's really happening on the wire is often of vital importance to my work. Actually, it's also a wonderful way to learn how network protocols work, if you're a learn-by-doing sort of person: unlike in many other areas of computing, you can easily see the layers of abstraction, how they fit together and most of the meaning of most of the data.
• Last but not least, the humble grep. It's definitely worth knowing how to use regular expressions, not just for advanced script-writing and such, but just for day-to-day operations. Being able to do more complex searches than just "contains these words/phrases" is, like carrying a multi-tool, something that rapidly makes life easier: something you subsequently "can't live without", in the sense intended by the question.

Poll #1134604 Writer's Block
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 2

Should I do more of these? (Obviously I'd only pick the ones I think are going to be interesting.)