Favourite Books - I read alot and here are some of my favourites

Favourite Movies - I do enjoy a good movie here are my favouties

Favourite Music - A small but fantastic collection, find out more.

Favourite IDE

My prefered IDE is Komodo, Supporting Ruby, Python and PHP out of the box it is the best dynmaic language IDE on the market and its **not** written in Java. Has the usual IDE features with a few extra, for example a reguar expression debugger , a http inspector and a code profiler. For php support for XDebug out of the box and supports the syntax highlighting for Twig and Smarty template library.

LAMP Stack

I am a PHP developer at heart and am glad to see the growing professionalism of the communcity with the embrace of tools like composer, phpunit and component based frameworks with Standards like PSR-0 and PSR-1.

VM Manager

I used Virtual Box for last 2 years and within the last six months Vagrant to manage project development VM's. I would recommend to others to make the switch. I have been caught in the past with differences bewteen dev and production and the time to provision an individual VM per project is worth it. I just wish my netbook could run virtualbox.

OS Preference.

I use Ubuntu on my laptop, netbook and desktops. I'm now very much locked into ubuntu and pay for access to Ubuntu One cloud folders. Running linux daily forces you to learn and better to error locally then on your servers.

Hosting Preference

I have used Linode for last 2 years their control panel is world class and their community library extensive. I also have a sharded hosing account with a local provider. Managing a mail server is an exercise in pain, better to make that someone else problem.

Front End Framework.

I have worked with jQuery and jQuery UI extensively in the past and flirted with ExtJs Version 2 and 3. I am now moving into Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile.