Some of you may have noticed I’ve been gone for a few months. More on that later. However, whilst I was away I found out that this site was cracked!
My apologies to any of you who were affected by this. I have taken steps to ensure this won’t happen again.
I’ll be back soon with more writing on PHP, JavaScript, Ubuntu and other Linux Distros and the fantastic Awesome Windows manager, I promise!
We had a bit of a nightmare over at ibrow Towers recently. Some bright spark at the building site down the road managed to cut the pipe supplying our interweb!
Disaster!
Fortunately the culprit managed to refrain from slicing all the way through, stopping just at the point to give us the drip feed equivalent of roughly a modem circa 1997. i.e. r e a l l y slow.
Did we really ever live with that? How did we cope?
But now it is the weekend, meaning that I have some spare time at home to explore the internet again. So here are a few links that I’m going to spend my morning reading.
This is just a quick post to say Happy Birthday this blog. Yes, I began my little journey into the Blogosphere one year ago today. Looking back on that first article, now is a good time to see if I managed to stay focused on the topics that I laid out in the beginning, as well as looking at some stats for the year and why I’m doing this.
This week I purchased myself two new toys. I always do something like this around this time of year because it’s my birthday! This year I decided to get an ergonomic keyboard and an e-reader.
The ergonomic keyboard was the easier decision and I went with the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000.One of the main reasons for this was the Jeff Atwood blog post.
The e-reader was much harder to choose. After much deliberation, googling, reading of reviews etc I eventually landed myself a Sony Pocket Reader PRS-300. I chose this over other e-readers for a number of reasons. Firstly the price was right, I didn’t really want to spend over £200 on what is effectively a fancy book. Secondly I only wanted it for reading, I didn’t care about taking notes, listening to music that kind of stuff. Finally I wanted to to be portable – obviously all readers are portable, but I wanted something that I could easily keep in a coat pocket for when I’m on a bus etc. or generally waiting around for something to happen.
First Impressions
The keyboard was huge! Much more so then I expected, but fortunately I have a big desk, so there was no problem there. I’ve never used an ergonomic keyboard before and I was suprised how comfortable it felt. I really thought I’d be able to enjoy typing. However, the space bar is a nightmare. Really sticky, hard to press down and very “clacky” Others have experienced this problem, but most suggested it gets “broken in” within a few days or week, so I’m not overly worried (yet).
The Sony e-reader is just beautiful. The text is clear, navigation simple, weight nothing to speak of and the size is perfect. I am in love with it. One problem was I said I had to use Windows to connect to it, so I fired up Vista for the first time in about half a year, and after about 20 minutes of installing it crashed. It did this again a couple of times, until I found out a fix – something so do with VB script and premissions. Rather stupidly I forgot to save the link that helped me fix the problem otherwise I would have posted it here. Sorry about that. However, it turns out I can connect to it within Ubuntu, and transfer books onto it – so that is good news.
I’m going to write a more substantial review for both after a couple of weeks usage, so stay tuned – sign up to my RSS feed.
As promised in my last post, I have spent a whole week using Emacs. Apart from the odd foray with Nano and Mousepad I haven’t touched Eclipse or Netbeans or any other IDE and managed to stick to Emacs for the full week.
How did it go?
To start off it was slow. Emacs has a notoriously high learning curve, and I pretty much started at the bottom. One of the reasons for doing this was so I could move away from the mouse and it turns out that the mouse is an extremely hard habit to break. So to are the keyboard arrow keys. I kept on finding my hands would instinctively jump off the keyboard and try to double click on something, or try to navigate around the page with the arrows. This is clearly not the way it is done in Emacs!
The next thing I found is that Emacs doesn’t let you indent code files as you want. It seems to have a preferred method and forces it on you. This is very annoying and being a n00b I still haven’t found a way around this.
However, after a couple of days I began to get the hang of it. Still painfully slow, but navigating around the page, buffers and windows was becoming gradually quicker. I began to enjoy using Emacs, even though my right hand kept on unceremoniously lurching to the right from time to time.
By a complete coincidence, on Wednesday I was invited to C-Base here in Berlin for a beginners’ introduction to Emacs. Even though it was all in German, and my Deutsch ist nicht so gut I was blown away by not only the speed but also the huge amount of functionality within Emacs. To see someone who actually knew Emacs inside out was a revelation. I made a huge amount of notes (within Emacs before you ask!) ready to test out for myself. This insight into the “how the pros use Emacs” has really been an eye-opener and I am determined to learn just a fraction of what was on display at the tutorial.
Summing up my week with Emacs.
It was hard work, there was much and is even more left to learn. It is a vast landscape to negotiate, with many nooks and crannies. But once it is mastered I have no doubt that my productivity will be greatly increased.
Other people diving into Emacs
Some useful sites
I have been toying around with the idea of using Emacs for a few months now. Emacs isn’t exactly a stranger to me, as I’ve been using it on and off for years, but I’ve never really tried to fully know it properly. However, recently I have been in front of the computer so long I feel like my hands are going to fall off! Which is why I’ve decided to try to move away from this point and click mouse nonsense towards a more streamline keyboard only work environment.
So I have decided to give Emacs a go for a full week as my single development editor. Previously I’ve been using Eclipse PDT – which became so slow – and Netbeans – which I like a lot, but it is still point and click. One of my inspirations for this was a blog post by Bradley Wright. Poor Bradley’s experience must have been so horrifying that he hasn’t posted a follow up for his weeks usage, and this is from several months ago. Brad, if you can hear me, please let me know how it went, I am dying to know! But until then, I am going to try it out for myself.
Wish me luck, and if you have any tips for PHP development within Emacs, please drop a comment below and help me along.
See you in a week.
Update: My week is up – read how I did.
At last (at very long last actually!) we have just launched our new site for our online development agency. (Did you spot the SEO-ness there?!) Whilst it is a bit sparse at the moment, over the next few weeks and months we’ll be adding to it, endeavouring to keep it a bubbling hub of life at ibrow. Please pop along, and let us know what you think.
One small step for man, one giant wait for mankind.
Well, it was something like that. Today marks the 40th anniversary since man first landed on the moon. 40 years. Forty years. Four decades. Fourteen thousand, six hundred and ten days. And I have one question:
Why can’t I visit the moon?
On September 12, 1962 President Kennedy proclaimed that man will go to the moon, as a challenge, a challenge that “is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win”. And they did. America went to the moon. America travelled 238,857 miles and into the future. And we are now further away from the future then ever.
In the past forty (40!) years mankind has acheived the most amazing things. We have mapped the human genome, we have developed an entirely new method of instant, collaborative communication, we have cloned a life, we have accomplished medical advances that would astound people from 40 years ago, we have invented travel at twice the speed of sound (and then decommissioned it), for the love of god, we have invented the waffle-sole running shoe!!
So, why can’t I fly to the moon?
Because we have lost the will. We have lost the will because we are focusing on the now. We are fighting amongst ourselves instead of realising we are more alike than we want to admit. We are squabbling over who has the most vengeful invisible friend whilst ignoring the glorious beauty of the universe we live in. We are blaming each other for making the planet slightly warmer instead of doing something about it. We have been sucked into worldly problems of survival instead of lifting our heads above the grass to look at the amazing view. We are waiting to see what happens. We are looking to the past, we are looking behind us to admire what we’ve done.
The human race is living out of it’s inbox and we are all missing the bigger picture.
I think the words of Kennedy summed it up best: “the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward–and so will space.”
So this is a plea from a citizen of a fallen empire: Come on America. Stop waiting. Stop looking to the past. Stop reminiscing about previous greatness. You are the only country that can possibly accomplish the unaccomplishable You are the only country that has the will, the drive, the energy to do this.
America, fly me to the moon.
I’ll let you into a little secret: I’m a huge Twitter fan. I’ve been using Twitter for over two years now (excluding a month’s break to get some actual work done) and I find it is a valuable source of news, opinion and comment. However, the more I think about it, I can’t help but conclude that Twitter is bollocks.
“But how can that be?!” I hear you cry, “surely Twitter is a the archetypal example of a Kuhnian paradigm shift: exponentially changing the way humans communicate with each other forever more. Gad zooks! just look at how it is redefining collective interaction, stripping out the once hierarchical monoliths of a bygone age, and helping to rebuild in their wake the conversations of meritocratic individualism, whilst simultaneously aiding us in our quest to navigate the choppy waters of “the long-tail“. For Christsakes man! what about the democratic ideal it is helping to instigate – just look at Iran!”
Well, yes, that is all true. But Twitter is still bollocks.
And it is bollocks for 3 reasons:
Read the rest of this entry »
In my never ending quest to improve this blog and your experience whilst reading it I have installed the Disqus comment system. I’ve seen this on a number of other blogs and it appears to work well. Hopefully this will encourage comments and improve the discussion.
The wordpress plugin that I used can be found here – took about one and a half minutes to install.
