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

After some searching around nothing was really helping.

In the end I had a poke around in the .sup folder, in which there was a file called lock – I simply removed it and all will work well again!

That was much easier than I thought!

More Sup posts

• Sup, OfflineIMAP, MSMTP on Jaunty
• Sup is saving my life!

I have just committed my first attempt at a simple RSS parser for Node.JS.

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!

You can fork it on GitHub.

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.

Visit the TinyTwit website, have a look, and create your own poll.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Communications

   I have to be able to email, chat, and talk with people via my computer

5. Music and sound

   I need to listen to music at work!

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

* I just had to make that point

Building My Perfect Desktop

• Day 1 – The Base System
  

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!

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.

Seeing that I’ve been living like it was 1997, the first thing I thought I better read was a great TechCrunch post: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997? The title says it all, but it is great to think of all the “what ifs” scenarios, not just for Steve Jobs and Apple, but also what if Larry hadn’t met Sergey? Bill hadn’t met Paul? Linus favourite types of animal wasn’t a penguin? The mind boggles.

(Tenuous link coming up…) Talking of Larry and Sergey, now we have a larger office, we’re thinking of getting involved with the Google Summer of Code, so I’m trying to find some info about 2010 and how to sign up.

At last! The LinuxCritic(s) have posted another article. Their posts normally go pretty indepth, so I’ll be reading this after hitting the “publish” button.

Other blogs I’m going to have a quick read over include:

• Keith Casey. I’ve been reading his blog for years, and it’s always good to catch up.
• Another blog I’ve been reading for years is Patrick McKenzie’s Micro ISV on a Shoe String.
• Matt Mullenweg’s (of Wordpress fame) blog can be pretty good, especially the artwork!
• There are many more, but I need to start reading them otherwise my morning will be over.

My first big regret is that I haven’t spent nearly as much time as I would have liked on Open Source and in particular Timesheet NG. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, yet again we’ve had a hectic year here at ibrow, which has consumed the majority of my time. However I think mainly it is bad organisation my end. I’m currently living a little “out of my inbox” (something that Sup is helping me to put right) without doing much forward planning.  I”m getting better at that, but it is clearly not one of my strengths! However, I am aiming to change that all, with Open Source becoming a core fixture at ibrow, and this is something we are all very keen on.

My lack of organisation skills have also put a dent in my consistency and frequency of posting. Some months I’ve posted nothing much, where as other months (read October) I have posted a huge amount. This is something I’m looking to put right and will be trying to consistently post at least once a week.

I haven’t posted nearly as enough code up here as I wanted. I think it is because of the sheer amount of time needed to create a decent blog post that is both useful, informative and the has a large amount of code in it – the formatting is a bit of a nightmare. However, again this is something I’ll be addressing over this next year.

Finally I’ve moved away from XFCE4 (in the form of Xubuntu) and am now running Fluxbox instead. This is a truly great Window Manager, even if it still has a few glitches on my system still. I’ll definitely be posting some Fluxbox related stuff up here soon.

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed in my stats as I started doing this. I had a frankly pathetic amount of visitor to this blog and I looked on whilst others were getting thousands (interesting to note that they haven’t posted for almost a month now, I wonder what’s going on). I honestly don’t know what the secret is of getting loads of visitors to a blog. This is probably why I don’t call myself a “marketing guru” and spout crap on Twitter all day long. Little dig there (again).

In total I’ve had 5,634 visitors over the last year (this is according to Google Analytics). The busiest month was last month with a whopping 1,067 visits, so almost a fifth of all visitors for the year visited in October alone and November looks like it will top that. Event though this is continuing a general trend or increasing visitors each month (December only had 213!) I think there is no surprise that October was my busiest month for posting articles as well.

One thing I’m worried about are the pages-per-visit, bounce-rate and time-on-site – basically if visitors, once they find there way onto my blog, stay around. Looking at the evidence, clearly they are not finding much to do here, with an average for each visitor staying just over a minute.  Clearly I need to do something about the “visitor engagement” as people who know more about this than me call it

So is it worth it? All this time and effort to create a blog that not very many people read?

Obviously it is disappointing that not more people are visiting my site, and those that are run screaming for the hills, but in total I’d say yes, it is worth it.  And it is worth it for these three reasons:

1. I’m not doing this to become some sort of famous blogger and make a living out of it, I’m doing it because I’m making a living doing something else.
2. I find it relaxing, and when an article is finished and goes live I get a tremendous feeling of satisfaction.
3. I’m primarily writing this blog to share ideas and thoughts, and if people find them useful then, well, that’s pretty good all round.

Onward to the next year!

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.

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

• Stephen O’Donnell – Choosing an Editor
• John Bokma – Emacs it is
  

Some useful sites

• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/
• http://www.emacswiki.org/
• http://emacsblog.org/

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.