As many of you know, I use Sup for my emailing needs, and I think it is pretty great. But today, disaster (or at least I initially thought so)!
Instead of opening up and downloading as normal it instead told me it was locked by another process. This in itself is not unusual, sometimes I close the terminal window it is running in by mistake, or shutdown without first closing sup. Hoever, what was different was that the user, host and PID were all blank. When I confirmed it should kill the old process it, well, crashed.
Error: the index is locked by another process! User '' on
host '' is running with pid .
The process was alive as of at least 14 seconds ago.
Should I ask that process to kill itself (y/n)? y
Ok, trying to kill process...
Terminated
It’s pretty simple at the moment, probably very buggy and needs lots done on it, but it is a start. I am making heavy use of Rob Righter’s node-xml module which has saved me hours, possibly days of time!
I have uploaded some tweaks to the user interface and back end functionality, plus also started work on an API. I even added a blog to keep you all up-to-date.
Today is an exciting day. I have in my possession a brand new custom built computer to use exclusively at the office. I currently use the laptop for both home and office work, but since the laptop is getting a bit old and computer components are so cheap these days I decided to build a work station just for me to use at the office. The best thing is that as it is custom built I can put whatever I damn well want on it – no pre-installed Windows or anything else. I can make it absolutely perfect for me.
I’ll be documenting here in my blog exactly the steps needed to take it from a tabula rasa to my perfect desktop system. Apart from the system being obviously Linux based, there will be a number of things to consider before I get started. If I want it to be perfect, I need to think about what it is that I really need and want from a work only system. So, after a brainstorm this is the breakdown of what I require:
Keyboard Friendly
I am becoming less interested in using the mouse. This is for a number of reasons, firstly it is quicker to keep your hands on the keyboard rather than always having to find the mouse and point and click. Secondly, using the mouse greatly exacerbates RSI and all that jazz. As such a system designed for maximum keyboard usage is important.
Great Web Development Tools
As a web developer this is a no brainer. I need to be able to have the tools for developing websites, testing (at code, server and client level) deployment and client side version control.
Base system should be small, quick and light
Due to point 2, I can see the need for being able to have virtualised instances of Windows running, each running a different version of IE. As such, the base system should be as small, quick and light as possible so it doesn’t get bogged down when I have one (or more) windows running for testing purposes.
Communications
I have to be able to email, chat, and talk with people via my computer
Music and sound
I need to listen to music at work!
Must get on with others
Some strange people out there still use propriety software. My system needs to be able to read Word and Powerpoint and all that stuff.
Not be rude
This is a strange request, but over the weekend I had a friend staying who is an IT administrator for a large international company. He had to do some work on their Windows based infrastructure, so he powered up Vista on my laptop (which I never use*) to log into their systems via the Remote Desktop. Half way through he had to make a couple of calls. When he came back Vista had rebooted and he had lost everything. We narrowed it down to the fact that Vista had updates, installed them and rebooted without even asking for permission. IMO, that is really fucking rude.
Stable
Last, but by no means least, the system has to be solid. I can’t have it crashing on me every hour.
And that is pretty much it. Follow me over the next week or so whilst I sort out my ideal perfect work station.
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 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.
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 BradleyWright. 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.
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 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 have been toying around with the idea of using 
