programming
for actual programs, look to the left. the sidebar is filled with many links to lumps of code and other stuffs. note: all code is in syntax-highlighted html, so you should move its contents into another file as plain text if you want to run it.
my language of choice at this moment is python, although i'm trying to get used to c#. it's a bit difficult, because i'm still frightened of semicolons and curly braces; that's one reason why i use python. syntactic whitespace is actually really pleasing to use; plus python has heaps of cool free stuff surrounding it. my i.d.e. right now is actually a d.d.e. (disintegrated development environment); i use glade interface designer for (surprise!) designing interfaces, emacs for editing my actual code (i love emacs), and a program called tepache for gluing. see, python has gtk+ bindings (pygtk) and a libglade, but both are a bit evil to actually write code from scratch using. that's why i use tepache: it's a code sketcher (as opposed to a code generator). i give it a glade file and it sketches some python code that uses libglade and a python library called simplegladeapp.py; and it supports a kind of incremental sketching, where i can write some event code in the python file, make a change to the glade file, re-sketch the code, and it will patch the existing file and not change my custom code. handy.
i'm also looking into gambas.
operating systems
i have a toshiba laptop (i use toshiba because, in my experience, they are immune to death) which has windows xp and ubuntu linux version 7.04. i use xp because i vista annoys me hugely (more on that later), and ubuntu because a) it's sponsored by a very rich person; b) it hasn't sold out (and is, in fact, almost entirely free*); and c) it is based on debian gnu/linux, and so its package manager is apt-get. and i loves apt-get.
annoyingly, my ext2 file system driver for xp is going buggy, and not showing any files in my home folder. that pisses me off, because i have stuff in there i need. curses. but enough of that.