Year: 2010

First time driving through the rain

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Seems that the rain and thunder finally made it’s way down here, mostly on time. As I was telling Timbo this morning, it was raining cats and dogs outside. Luckly while I was catching a couple quick Z’s, the radio stream I had running told ma that the roads we’d be traveling had not been to flooded… so I didn’t loose the opportunity to drive. Weather has never bothered me in any way really, especially not the rain: and I need the experience of being on the slickened roads. However fast I’ve been mastering the car compared to ‘normal’ people, it’s probably not advisable to let a noob out in such conditions, but the only way that you can learn such a skill is by live fire exercise; and with my mother, only GOD knows how many chances there are going to be in order to do it in time :-S. I left a message with a friend, in case of any major accident.

The first leg of things went fairly smooth: except for having to be ordered about like a moron. My mothers continual insistence that I `improperly` stop at stop signs by coming to a halt before the edge, is also annoying me enough that it’s going on my todo list, to check the state law on the ficken matter. I might not be a rocket scientist, but I know how to read English correctly. Edit: just emailed her the proof that I am correct! IAW Georgia state law, you bring her to a full stop before crossing the stop line or cross walk, other wise you can move up if needed; and either way, the laws for entering a road way require you to stop again if need be, befor entering if there are any cars to close‐whether or not you stopped at a stop sign already.

Maybe my educational background combined with my computer presence, has damaged the quality of my composition skills, but I can read this cracked up language with machine-like proficiency! Perhaps that is much to the annoyance of everyone else outside more ‘technical’ circles xD.

Although we arrived with time to spare at the Community Medical Centre, as usual the clinic also took a good half hour past the scheduled appointment time to accept her for the checkup >_>. So I passed the time reading a text book on electronics and EE, before powering up Dixie. Spent most of it brushing up on my CLisp, until the battery started to run low… then I got stuck twiddling my thumbs for another hour and a half. Managed to convince H.R.P. to get her prescriptions filled today in order to extend the driving time, and save her a later trip after work. By the time we left Krogers, some  9-10 hours after the storms started, it was almost free and clear out.

So far, I’ve had two good bits of practice today: stretches of highway where the speed limit is much higher than the rest of our area, and driving in enough rain that you wouldn’t want to stick your head out the window xD. I tend to drive more cautiously than most people, because, eh, shall we say, the local drivers are a trifle psychotic at times. Life has also taught me that when death, injury or serious property damage is likely to result it is usually best to assume that the other schmuck will fuck up, and B/P to cope with it happening.

Some how, I am reminded of a story my mother once told me, form when she was learning to drive, and made grandpa’s hair stand on end after a very, very near miss! Well, I’m to darn paranoid to put my mother through that lol. Threatening to gag, or strap her to the roof of the car when she is being too bossy on the other hand, is a different story. Or should we say, where I come from, the asshole in the drivers saddle calls the ball.

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I’m really starting to get addicted to Google Chrome’s ability to auto-resize it’s windows when dragged and dropped into the right spots. It’s a feature of some unix window managers that I’ve rarely used, that’s starting to make me wish it was built into Windows XP, instead of being a trick of the Chromium trade 8=).

At long last

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My forum account on www.sasclan.org is finally ready op! It was unsuspended a few days ago, once WIZ completed the usual procedures. Kicking the bigger system into obedience, +1 for [SAS] admin power. Last time, I had to respond to a chit chat post via private e-mail.

One thing that I do not miss about being in [SAS], is having to deal with the ‘magic’ behind it, any more than it takes to make a forum post. Although I know my way around blindfolded in spots… I ain’t never gonna miss that code base.

SWAT 4 at it’s finest

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When you creep up behind a suspect and punch him in the back of the head.
Then you suddenly bounce off the floor like you’ve been hit by a grand piano right in the kisser, because he just shot out his backside ;).

What exactly, ‘is’ my development environment?

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I reckon this is something rather confusing these days, in most cases among younger folks, it will likely mean an Integrated Development Environment. To me, it just means the environment in which one develops stuff ;).

Being a lower level polyglot in terms of languages and tools, I generally keep a ‘pallet’ associated with each of my main languages, keeping things quite simple to work with:

  • Build Tools:
    • Some viable form of Make is required, generally I’ll use local brew if an extension is needed. I prefer GNU Make over BSD PMake, as I find it more reliably cross-platofrom.
    • CMake, while often little more than a poorly strung together bother, many projects now use CMake based build systems. It is actually a good tool but I don’t favour it for use outside of a single OS family.
    • SCons: powerful and effective, but often irksome to get a portable build. It’s usually worth having available.
    • Ant: you never know when you’re gonna need it.
    • Local brew of IDE and their background stuff, for example Visiual Studio for the vcbuild/msbuild modules and/or Code::Blocks. If I had a Mac, I’d likely have XCode handy.
  • Documentation Tools
    • Unix: troff/nroff and the usual macro packages. I actually like it.
    • DocBook and XML/XSLT processing utilities. LibXSLT comes in handy.
    • ReSTructured text and company
    • Any local language related tools (e.g. for Java, Perl, Python, and C#)
    • Doxygen: a multi-lingual documentation generator.
    • Exuberant CTags: improved and vastly multi-lingual upgrade over ctags.
    • TeX and LaTeX setups. I like TeXLive.
  • Source Code Management / Version Control Systems
    • Git — must have!
    • Anything I need to be handy with:
      • CVS
      • Subversion/SVN
      • Bazaar/BZR
      • Mercurial/HG
  • C/C++
    • I generally setup and maintain several compilers, multiple versions being welcomed. Generally I try to hang onto a member of the GCC 3 and 4 branches, and a fairly recent version of Microsoft Visual C++. Under unix-like and Windows systems respectively, I also tend to carry about a copy of PCC and Watcom.
  • Java
    • A suitable JDK, or a complete software development kit where appropriate.
    • The GNU Compiler for Java can be useful.
  • C#
    • Mono and preferably the full stack of technology.
    • Under Windows: several versions of the .NET framework and at least a workable version of Microsoft Visual C#.
  • Python
    • A copy of CPython, preferably both modern versions of 2.x and 3.x releases.
    • The usual parts of CPython that some distrios strip out, like SQLite3 or Tk bindings.
    • Another implementation for testing (e.g. IronPython) is appreciable.
  • Perl
    • A standard perl distribution, preferably the current major version or the one before it.
    • Common perl modules one is actually likely to use someday.
  • Lisp
    • CLISP for general use, i.e. common lisp
    • Armed Bear Common Lisp (ABCL) in case it eases deployment issues
    • GNU Guile: my normal way to use scheme.
    • Bigloo: a scheme compiler that’s worth poking around
    • Some other readily available Scheme implementation available, preferably one that is at least moderately R5RS compliant
  • PHP
    • Fairly recent version of PHP setup with
      • Command line interp.
      • Suitable Apache modules
      • The CGI/FastCGI friendly thingy
  • Ruby
    • Current local-main line version.
    • Rake build tool.
    • A collection of handy modules
  • UNIX shell scripting
    • Something fairly portable, ash/dash based is nice.
    • GNU BASH.
    • Real and public domain versions of the Korn Shell.
    • ZSH, my favourite.
  • Go
    • Standard distribution compiled from source.
GUI and Console versions of Vi IMproved being a very obvious requirement ;). I also tend to keep versions of Emacs, some flavour of MicroEMACS, and SciTE available in a pinch.  I like having ed available.
Generally some form of webserver, be it a quick tester (ala Python) or dedicated (I like nginx and Apache), is usually required: plus a decent web browser with javascript support.
Profiling, code generation, analysis, and debugging tools are almost universally welcome. I in particular like to keep Valgrind and GDB handy for a rainy day.
Like wise I prefer having certain libraries fully integrated into that stack, i.e. where appropriate having interfaces the common GNU/Gnome libraries (GTK+/cie), Qt3 and Qt4 libraries, bindings for SQLite3 and a major player (MySQL, MSSQL, etc), OpenGL, and so on and so forth. I tend to leverage both languages and tools whenever possible.
Someday I’ll likely incorporate Lua, and dialects of Forth and ML into the mixture. Like wise I prefer a reasonably NAWK friendly version of AWK to be available. I also have interests in picking up Prolog, Haskell, Erlang, Ada, and a few lesser known languages, but just don’t have the time to screw with such things a lot these days :'(. 
Simply put, where I go, a whole freaking lot of development tools go with me!