current affairs Archive

Before I used an Apple machine with OSX, XEmacs was my editor of choice. Recently I saw Emacs 23 being released with native OSX support in the main repository (well, NextStep support formally, but with Cocoa bindings, which makes it OSX native I guess).

That alone was enough to revisit the old friend. With caution, because I still feel the pain somewhat of switching to TextMate from Xemacs. Another reason is that I sort of lost patience lately with proprietary applications. (TextMate in this case). I’m finding it less doable to have to wait for another developer to be able to find the time to fix issues or provide upgrades within reasonable intervals.

I’ve had a similar experience with Ecto not that long ago. You’d think I’d have learned by now…

Using Emacs again instead of TextMate was actually quite easy. My fingers still ‘remembered’ the keys to press apparently. However, the learning curve to use the editor effectively is still steep. It’s still, and now more than it was with the native build, a joy to work with though.

What keeps (re-)surprising me about Emacs is that there’s apparently a mode or package for anything you want to do to get you 80% of the way and, thanks to the strong customization, the other 20% is around the corner.

I switched last week and since then I’ve discovered a mode that lets me view PDF-files (docview), a mode that connects to my microblog (identica-mode), spent quite a few hours in org-mode organizing my notes and task-lists (including syncing them to my iPhone), editting XML files in nxml-mode and blogging right now with the weblogger package.

I seriously think you can take a bare iron machine, install a minimal linux kernel on it, configure Emacs as the ’sole interactive application’ on it and still end up with a useful machine, not missing out on any task you’d want to perform.

Last Monday was my 40th birthday. I’m kind of used to having a quiet birthday; most of the people are always on holidays during this time of year. My girlfriend had organised a two day trip, she usually does something like that for my birthday, to an unknown destination to do something unknown. We were leaving on Sunday and returning on Monday evening.

Sunday we went to an outdoor activity centre where we goofed around in a Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB), got very muddy on a quad and very wet on some jet-skis. Very good fun and indeed a perfect way to spent a day for my birthday. A good diner-out and sleep-over in a hotel completed the day. I thought it was perfect and I thought it was over…

However, the next day the GPS steered me towards the town centre of Utrecht where she got me an hour to play with one of these:

For those of you who do not recognise it; it’s the Segway i2 Personal Transporter. A self-balancing two-wheel transportation device. It’s positioned somewhere in the gap between a bicycle and a pedestrian.

I’ve been mumbling about these things for a while now, but they cost a small fortune (for a toy, which it would be, for me). On top of that, their added value maximises in the city, and we live nowhere near a city! So, I can not defend a good reason to want one, other than that this is the most natural way to control a motorised vehicle I have ever driven. (or glide, what seems to be the segway term for driving).

Renting one of these things does not help to cure this curiosity, au contraire! Now I want one even more!

So, as of Monday I find myself thinking about formulating a consistent argument for buying one. A new one costs around € 5000,= so that is serious money. I have actually done calculations how many kilometres I would have to glide, replacing short trips in my car and saving gas, to earn back the investment. (Quite a few, it turns out)

Would I travel by train more if I had one? The nearest train station is like 10 kilometres from here, which is more or less doable; the range of the segway is advertised as around 40 km on one battery charge. I visit most of my clients by car (most of them are big and are in industrial areas, not in cities), but I guess one out of four trips could be replaced by the segway/train combination.

Would I take it with me if going to town by car? Most definitely. Would we be going on city trips more? I guess, but we would then have to buy 2 of them.

Would I be running the errands in our village with it? I think so. What shops we have here are mostly at 4 to 5 km distance from our home, so that is well within the Segway range.

The above sort of reasoning goes on for a while and at a certain point I have convinced myself it is ‘reasonable’ to purchase it. At the very least, there is a feeling of: ‘Hey, I have worked hard to earn this money, I have deserved this!’ The reasoning has never failed, assuming the enthusiasm of a product of service did not fade. (If they do, they usually fade quickly for me).

It’s not that I have regrets over previous toy purchases, but the question remains: “Is there still a way to prevent me purchasing one”?

For the moment, I think I am going to construct a symbolic big saving jar with the word ‘SEGWAY’ written on it.

After quite a long period of using ecto, I have switched to using Marsedit. Ecto got sold beginning last year by Adriaan to Illuminix. There has been no update of ecto since and I’m seeing no signs of improvement either. Does this mean ecto as a product is bad? No. I still love the idea and implementation of it. It is still a rough product though, has a number of annoying bugs and generally needs polishing; in other words: maintenance. After filing a couple of bugs and generally getting minimal or no response to them, time has probably come to expand my options.

With the set-up I have (wordpress-µ self hosted, off-line editing, flickr for images) switching between ecto and MarsEdit is hardly any work at all. Key in the account details in the new client and you’re basically good to go.

The only drawback I saw upfront was that MarsEdit does not have a wysiwyg like editor as ecto has. I’m not so much looking for the wysiwyg part, but avoiding the html editing process. I worked around this by installing a server side MarkDown plugin which enables me to edit posts in MarkDown. MarsEdit has a Preview Text Filter which supports MarkDown, so I actually feel the situation has improved.

I find MarsEdit a bit more intuitive in terms of navigation and menu entries and quite a bit faster to work with. The most important thing however is that the product is properly maintained by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Software. In the last year he has updated the application 4 or 5 times with healthy changelogs and (judging by the forums) Daniel is very much on top of things. That looks a lot better than the current ecto situation.

While looking for a solution to a LaTeX path search problem i ran into this:

He’s a brave soul, I did this years ago too, but was afraid to admit (let alone publish it). (Oh and I also found the solution to my LaTeX search problem there)

I just migrated the posts from this site from Xaraya to a Wordpress install, just like I did with My Cobra Blog. Apparently I have been playing for about 5 years with it since my first post. The blog started out as a subdomain of hsdev.com, using an install of Moveable Type (I forgot the version).

I don’t think I used MT for a long time. At the time I was maintaining/rewriting all the xmlrpc/blogging modules for Xaraya and it made sense to use my own blog as a testenvironment for it. This weekend I installed Wordpress on our servers. Both the “normal” version and the WordPress-µ (Multi-User) were installed. (I had already started with the 2.7 beta, but along the way I sort of realised that the multi user variety is a better choice for me).

So, all new software again for the measly 10 posts I do a year.

The plan is to have mrblog.nl be a ‘top-level’ kinda thing, perhaps multi-domain to allow quick creation of blogs and use subdomains for specific purposes (like the cobra blog and I want to experiment with a photo-blog at some point too).

We’ll see.