Don’t live with a broken IDE

Integrated Development Environments are all the rage these days, with Eclipse being the sort-of break-out winner.  I don’t use an IDE, exactly, I use that ancient rustbucket of a text editor, Emacs, and while Emacs isn’t exactly an IDE, this rule applies: don’t live with a broken IDE.

For the past six months, I’ve been working with Emacs 21 on my desktop at work.  I do development in a number of different languages that require syntax highlighting and proper indentation: C, Python, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.  The Javascript highlighting engine did not work correctly: the indentation interpereter was almost alway wrong, leaving me with poorly-indented code that was hard to read.  I ended up wasting, I’m sure, hours hand-indenting the code so that I could see what I was doing.

I finally got tired of this rigamorale and asked  if I could please update the Emacs install by hand.  We’re discouraged from putting into the base OS anything that’s not approved by Red Hat, but he said sure, if I needed it and could build it by hand, if they ever had to restore my OS I obviously could do it again.  So I quickly built Emacs from scratch and installed it in /usr/local, which I then immediately backed up to the virtualization drive to make sure it would be there if I needed it in the future.

It has made all the difference in the world.  Emacs 22’s javascript-mode just works, and it does indentation at four spaces per closure properly.  Not only was I able to actually see the syntactical error I was making in a javascript configuration pass in Ext-JS, but I could see how the entire dialog manager could be abstracted out further into a metahandler and reduced my code duplication by half. Now that’s programmer efficiency.

Just a simple reminder: if your IDE doesn’t work exactly the way you want it to, it is slowing you down.  It’s worse than having no IDE and no smart editor, because a broken IDE  distracts your from the task at hand, drains time and will you have allocated to the programming task at hand, and introduces errors into your attention. Managing your attention span is the number one skill for the Internet age, and a tool that comes between you and that successful management is a disaster.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Cut off in mid-idea.

Don’t you just hate it when you’re just really about to get the story moving, when the really important thing that finally gets the initial crisis underway has happened– and you have to stop writing because the alarm just went off and it’s time to go to the office for ${DAY_JOB}?  Yeah, me too.  Well, at least when I pick it up this evening, it’ll be right at the correct moment: “Miss Abbas, you can’t go walking about Highfrost without underwear!”

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Fusepod Saves the Day!

I managed to restore a significant portion of my music collection at the office, and had a geek moment while I did so. I mounted my iPod's managerial API as a filesystem under Gentoo Linux and sucked it dry.

The iPod is a 5GL 30GB machine. It's old but so far still reliable. I've dropped it three or four times during it's life span. (I got it in March of 2006.)

FUSE is the Filesystem in Userspace toolkit, a simple library that hooks into the Linux mount system and allows you to mount anything as a filesystem so long as it speaks the FUSE API.

If you've ever owned an iPod, you know that the iPod database presents a number of different paths to the music. /Genre/Artist/All/Album/Song is one path, and /Albums/Songs is another. If those look like filesystem paths, good, because Fusepod thinks so too. I was able to mount my iPod database as a filesystem and then just use rsync or tar to copy everything out of my iPod and onto my desktop.

The sequence after plugging in the iPod is:

 # sudo mount -o ro /mnt/ipod
 # sudo fusepod -o allow_other,ro /mnt/ipod-fuse
 # cd /mnt/ipod-fuse/Albums
 # tar cvf - . | ssh desktop 'cd Music; tar xf - '
 # sudo fusermount -u /mnt/ipod-fuse
 # sudo umount /mnt/ipod
 # sudo eject /mnt/ipod
 

Since this was just pulling stuff off the ipod, I mounted it read-only. I didn't want there to be a chance of fusepod mucking with the database, since I also use GtkPod as my preferred tool of syncing the thing and I've sometimes had problems in the past with fusepod and gtkpod disagreeing on the hash keys used to compile the iPod's music database.

If you're a Gentoo user, FUSE is part of the normal package of available installs under portage, but Fusepod is not. For that, you'll have to use the Sunrise overlay, and mark it permitted, because it's currently masked testing for x86 (as is everything in Sunrise).

Personal cliches

I have noticed that I have a rather odd cliche’ in my stories. I don’t think it’s a particular tic of mine, but this morning while I was trying to figure out what to do with Officer Orin and Anaria Abbas (oh, dear, that’s a terrible last name; I shall have to change it), the crux of which is that the upstanding officer learns that Miss Abbas is running around town with a very short skirt and no underwear. So, how does the officer get a good upskirt glance of the rather airheaded Miss Abbas? How do I get him down to the ground?

He slips on the ice, falls and hurts himself, of course. A groaning turn over onto his back, which gives an full inventory of Anaria’s glories. A laceration on his forehead gives Anaria an excuse to bend down, bringing him an even better view and arousing other senses. And her care for him is a kind of intimacy forced by circumstance.

Except that I’ve done this before.  A few times, I think.  Furry & Nicolai had a “caring for the injured” scene, as do Linia & Shandy in the Honest Impulse novel.  It seems too convenient, or maybe I’m just noticing it more.

Maybe I don’t read enough romance. (I haven’t been reading romance recently, anyway; historical non-fiction and Joe Abercrombie’s nifty The First Law has been my reading stack this week.) Is caring for the injured as a pretense for getting the characters into physical contact, with barriers lowered by circumstance, a common trope in romance? Or is it just me?

Do you have a personal cliche that you’d be uncomfortable using again?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.