So far, I’ve gotten to use one of my favourite programming languages at work (YKY) but actually getting to tested the project under live conditions, ended up making me remember what an acquaintance once said about using punch cards. It was a refreshing change from what they have me using the most though, which is something I like about this company. I get to use the same tools often enough to be comfortable, yet I end up changing tools often enough to break the monotony :).
In my off hours, I converted my laptop from Zenwalk GNU/Linux to the same distribution my workstation is running at work, and have made the transition from relying on GNOME to using Xmonad with GNOME’s panels. After getting that sorted over a couple nights, I was able to rig my workstation to match. Even had time to revamp my shell profile a bit. I’m also in the progression of making another shell my defacto standard, because I spend a lot of time working on other machines over a terminal, and they don’t always have zsh :'(. So maybe it is a good thing that my shell profile supports like every bourne shell I’ve come across, excluding shells/v7sh from the FreeBSD ports; but hey, even I have to draw the line at a bourne shell that supports functions!
So far, I am really loving Xmonad on both my workstation and laptop. It fits my one itch against tiling window managers perfectly: getting a viable system tray working without config’ abuse. The default key bindings are also pretty sweet. The reason for the switch however, is because of one of my projects at work. Testing it involves running it quite a lot. While Compiz would continually stick it anywhere it felt best, and I would have to move it clear in order to review the logs—Xmonad just splits the screen realistate between them, allowing me to read code, read logs, and interface with the application, all without a headache. It’s also kind of nice how workspaces pretty much replace minimization, especially when it works smoothly with the pager in GNOME’s panel.
In the past two days, I’ve seen the cotton picking traffic back up to hell and back over lane closures, gotten lost once, been in danger of being killed twice, been nearly shoved off the road by an asshat in a white van, and once each nearly hit by a tyre, fender, or what ever the fuck went flying off that black sedan in this mornings traffic!
Plus to top it all off, the TomBoy’s syncronization tools managed to whipe out all of my notes over the weekend, leaving me with only three outdated ones when I got into the office on Monday. Just peachy. Had a small lull in todays workload, where I started to evaluate two solutions: TiddlyWiki and viki_vim. TiddlyWiki is pretty cool but it doesn’t like being edited from Google Chrome in *linux*, which is where I need it most. It’s also rather a bit of a pain in the ass to use in Mozilla on same platform. So I have rulled that out for now. The viki on the other hand, is very interesting—in particular, I would like to combine it with a set of BufWritePost hooks to have the effect of doing a git commit on the note file. For the moment, it’s seeing continued evaluation.
A web service for notetaking, isn’t really to my taste. While it would be O.K. enough for my personal notes, I find it more convienant to keep my notebooks together, in TomBoy alone, I had groupings for Personal, Programming, and the name of the company I work for; and since I’m not interested in splitting that, I’m also not willing to let my work notebook end up stored on any of the web services I’ve seen.
Alright, so I’m a paranoid geek, so sue me.
Something that also interests me, is whether or not I could mesh googlecl, vim, viki/deplate, and Blogger, and have a nice way of editing stuff in vim and posting it here. That would be kind of sweet. While TwiddlyWiki is more like a stream of conciousness way of searching your notes, Viki is more like exploring buffers, not to mention a lot less of a pain in the ass to use on BSD/Linux ;). It also saves my muscle memory from having to re-adjust to emacs enough to use org-mode, hehe. While I kind of like the browsing interface in TiddlyWiki, I will confess that vi-like editing is a huge plus in my book.