Had a nice nap, but a strange dream.

by

The earliest thing I can remember, was a gathering of family. I remember we were getting into boats and were rowing out, my Grandfather was at the other end of my boat and said something about a everyone taking ‘swim’. I said I didn’t know how to swim, which is technically true. So plans were changed and the water was covered with this huge blue canvas and we all piled out of the boats and setup for the get together, or whatever we were doing there…

I laid back on the canvas and thought to myself. About how the last time I felt like this without having to worry about the swaying waves washing over me, was years and years ago to when I was about three years old; sloshing about in the huge pool in the back yard with a snorkel, fins, and an inflatable tube. Hmm, it’s probably been at least twelve years since I was last in a pool, let along those days lol.

Then it began to rain, so we draped green canvas covers over our ‘camp ground’ and went about business. Someone asked me to look something up, so I fired up my laptop battery power.As the weather got worse, the group split: some went in search of better shelter, a few stayed; I was assigned to stay put. Sometime later, I got thumped on the head, pulling off the canvas to take a look; I saw that I had been hit in the head by a failing tree branch, and the corner of the area was riddled with such debree.

So I decided it would be better to get out of here, even if it meant getting a bit wet lol. In the ensuring action, which in the real world would’ve resulted in a laptop yielding electro-shock therapy… The last of the group moved into the building like structure at the center of the area, as the rain got even worse. I helped with setting up the stetting up the ticker storm-guard on the point of entry.

Next my attention turned to food prep and emacs. Then Aunt Ruth and some others were trying to get in, so I removed the storm-thing from the point of entry to let them in, and then was set in search of emacs, xemacs, and another funky coloured pen labeled ‘3.5.1’ or was it ‘3.5.8’, or ‘3.8.1’, or ‘3.8.5’ or something like that; it was supposed to be a fork of XEmacs :

Why on earth would a Vi-lover dream of emacsen!?

That’s when I woke up in a cold sweat, looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool.

Losing the war: On evading lisp

by

AAGGGGHHH !!!!

Why does Lambda Calculus and Scheme have to be so damn interesting!!!

I need to be kicking myself into a standard tool kit of language+libs+utils, not learning a new one lol. But I have an addiction to learning things :

Perfect choice from a favorite raido station

by

If tomorrow all the things were gone,
I’d worked for all my life.
And I had to start again,
with just my children and my wife.

I’d thank my lucky stars,
to be livin here today.
‘ Cause the flag still stands for freedom,
and they can’t take that away.

And I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I wont forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.

And I gladly stand up,
next to you and defend her still today.
‘ Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land,
GOD bless the USA.

From the lakes of Minnesota,
to the hills of Tennessee.
Across the plains of Texas,
From sea to shining sea.

From Detroit down to Houston,
and New York to L.A.
Well there’s pride in every American heart,
and its time we stand and say.

That I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I wont forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.

And I gladly stand up,
next to you and defend her still today.
‘ Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land,
GOD bless the USA.

And I’m proud to be and American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I wont forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.

And I gladly stand up,
next to you and defend her still today.
‘ Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land,
GOD bless the USA.

— Proud To Be An American, Lee Greenwood

Days roaming

by

Hmm, a most unusual day…

I was invited into the meeting in #pcbsd-team today on freenode. Some interesting discussion, but still a bit boring; well, what can I say? I’m still tight lipped about my own operations ^_^. At least though, the developers are trying to improve things, but there are somethings I keep to myself for the time being. And hope they take care of the more serious things. The whole time I was busy with a SSH session to my laptop, working on code haha! But I did pay good attention while I was present. Somewhat of an odd feeling really, because I’ve generally kept a good distance from PC-BSD.

As to other business of the day, I’ve been working on my little ‘nag’ app. The basic premise of the program, is to take notes, keep them, and when necessary, shout at me about them. In the past, I’ve tried applications with sticky notes, which usually take control of my second monitor or a spare virtual desktop. I’ve also tried PIM software, but I find I always end up spending more time in programming the useless thing around my schedule or arguing over portability issues :. The only problem I have with it, is the choice of either file-system, sqlite, or xml based storage for notes and metadata. The SQLite way would be the fastest for me to write code for; but somewhat a sidestep around my love for accessing data through textual interfaces.

Something like:

~/.nag/
      notes/
            1/
              title
              text
              ...

would be the most fun to have to work with as a user of my own program, which I’d be using daily lol. Actually, it kind of reminds me of the Process File System, but procfs’es usually live in memory only. Standardizing myself around Python for most stuff, has really helped me get work done… Now if only my old friend Perl wouldn’t keep starring at me when ever I see the need to process text……..

I’ve also gotten the priority ‘go code’ on one of my projects in [SAS], at least with this… It’s far enough displaced from the old-sludge I have to maintain, that I can actually define it’s behavior correctly, and do it in a sane way the first time around. And make sure that this project, will result in something that *will* stand some test of time, without pissing off the next coder!

Now if I could do something about camping out [SAS] Proving Grounds #3 and playing Battle For Wesnoth every chance I get >_>. But hey, I’ve was stuck in front of a code editor for almost a 4 days straight!!!! Then I had to go back to work 🙁 🙁 :-(, so a lit’ game time ain’t that bad a change of pace hehe.

Writer’s Block: Customizable Party

by

Invent a political party for the nation in which you reside. What does your ideal platform consist of?

Live Journals Writer’s Block
(General disclaimer, I mostly hate politics) That action is better then political ideology That what is morally and intellectually right (enough), is what should be done. That being just and right, is better then being extreme and [right |or| wrong], because it will eventually become unjust. That working together as a nation, is better then bickering along party lines — compare the last 8 years, to 1939-1947. In the course of life, I’ve learned that there are only a handful of absolutes: GOD, Life, Death, and Tax. And it would take volumes to properly explain the above ^, which would probably open things up to a form of internet driven political kibozing lol. But in honor of the two ruling parties of this nations political system, a few quotes that stand out to me:

To sit back hoping that someday, someway, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last–but eat you he will. — President Ronald Reagan (Republican) When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. — President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democratic)

And to further quote a great man, who did get off his ass and step up to the bat when America needed a man of action (which is really saying something!),

“Be sincere; be brief; be seated.” — F.D.R.

Amen.

by

dreadfully bored, and equally miserable… even as my projects snap into place.

Surfing the web, but nothing else to do: but watch the passing of the time on the clock. Also been thumbing though ~/Documents, I’ve quite a lot of things stored thre, both of my own and vaious things I’ve collected in my travels.

To tired to find something to work on, to awake to sleep, to much more to go, to just do nothing….

by

How long O LORD
Must I wrestle with my thoughts
And every day
Have such sorrow in my heart
Look on me and answer
O GOD my father
Bring light to my darkness
Before they see me fall
But I trust in YOUR unfailing love
Yes my heart will rejoice
Still I sing of YOUR unfailing love
YOU have been good to me
YOU will be good to me

— source unknown

by

Well, managed to get one site mock up down. Was not to hard, since I’m not about to get to Fancy with it without knowing the typesetting style they want.

Family is driving me crackers a bit, ma is quite disturbed by the news and epecially paranoid about gas; what can I say?

I’ve expected a depression since ~1996
Business can not be trusted to self regulate itself (most of the time)
To many politicians care more about their political view then getting work done. (Although I my say s/politicians/republicans/ if I analyzed things more closely)

And I’m trying to code, not dig for oil wells !

by

Some how in my case, having very crazy dreams is usually a sign that everything is normal :

From being stuck in a game that feels like a cross between Halo on Legendary and Call of Duty. Oddly a PP-19 Bizon in 9x18mm Makarov and a Colt M1911 is an interesting mixture for fighting aliens in CQB, along side a Covenant Plamsa-rifle hehe.

To being owner, court jester, lead cook, and chief flirt of a restaurant. To winding up in some kind of crazy Army of Darkness and Jason and the Argonauts skeleton-battle inspired global war, a pump action shotty with unlimited ammo is useful >_>. Alll the way to being trapped in a town under assault from vampires, and having to organize people into a resistence…

My dreams are crazy as a mad hatter lol

Vim rules text editing !

by

An interesting thing to come up in #vim, Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?. Which reminds me a lot of why vim has ruined me for all other editors, except vi.

When I first took up programming, I had started with C++ (probably not a good choice), and I selected an IDE so I could concentrate on C++, not the compiler and debugger. When I started to learn other languages, which my C++ focused IDE didn’t give a flying flub about, So I quickly came to the conclusion, that since I would never _stop_ learning, I would do best to find a general purpose code editor. Because if I kept using IDEs, I would spend more time learning to use Integrated Development Environment XYZ then programming something meaningful in language XYZ.

I knew that the most widely used (read if the machine supports text, it probably runs this editor) would likely be Emacs and Vim. I’m the kinda guy, I like to use the same tools without caring about the OS ‘too much’. Although I don’t mind if a program changes widget styles to match, I hate things like Firefox that change from Microsoft ‘Tools->Preferences” and Unix “Edit->Preferences” instead of just creating a damn “Settings” entry in the file menu. So obviously, an editor that works that way, can suck my **** lol. Emacs and Vim are fairly consistent.

At that point in time, text editing consisted of Left, Right, Up, Down, Delete, Backspace, Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End… nothing else (I had yet to learn the control modifier to them). Currently, the number of actions I know in Vi and Vim, far exceed that by the size of the death star, hell… I know more emacs then that, and I haven’t “really” used emacs in years. But I didn’t really care about that kind of stuff at the time, I just wanted something with syntax highlighting and extreme portability.

I knew full well, that Vim and Emacs were extremely powerful tools; but they would take learning to use that effectively. A knife is a simple weapon, using it ain’t. (And admitidly, if emacs was a pocket knife, it would be the “swiss army knife” to existing Swiss Army Knifes, as swiss army knifes are to classic pocket knifes.) The main thing that attracted me to Vim and Emacs, was hat they support many languages out of the box (vim 7.2 supports around ~500 by now, for syntax highlighting alone.), and could be extended with support for more.

So for one reason or another, I gave vim the first try. I couldn’t even figure out how to open or save files with it; as I had elected not to use the graphical editing interface. I basically chucked Vim in the corner and started looking at emacs, choosing XEmacs over GNU Emacs. XEmacs proved to be a quite a nice editor and very useful to me. In fact, I think my user account on Josephine still has XEmacs for Windows as my default text editor. Later on down the road, I was reading a skit, using pico, gnu emacs, and vi. Reading the part on lowly Vi, it all looked pretty darn logical all of a sudden lol. So I started to play around with Vim, using the :help system to learn to use Vi. In a short period of time, I became much more effective at editing text then Iw as under XEmacs or Wordpad; in my case vi commands were also much easier to remember before muscle memory caught up.

Why do I use Vim, and utterly hate all other editors? (Except for vi and microemacs.) Most typical editors are week in the knees, trying to ‘edit’ text with them after living with vi/vim, just feels like dancing with a cement kimono, I work with textural information non stop, be it books, web browsing, television, instant messengering, e-mail, games, etc; even the operating systems command line interface, let alone editing text files lol.

*Actually* learning how to use vim the right way, quickly lead to editing smoothly and learning how to learn more ;-). One thing I like about vim, it is modal like vi, and my brain is essentially modal as well! And unlike emacs, it doesn’t seem to slow my down when exercising my “ten fingered typist” style of using a keyboard. With vim, the only limit is you mind. Tonight, I’ve actually learned 4-6 new things (most of which are vi compatible hehe) tonight, that allow me to edit even more effectively then I have been. Which if I had to compare to the best offerings of notepad.exe or MS Word, Vim has allowed me to be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000^256 times more effective. And yesterday, I spent what, like 16 hours editing code?

If I had to use something like notepad for that, I would go out of my fucking mind !!!!!

Just for the heck of it, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000^256 is the equivalent of:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

But I don’t think I know how to count that high in written English LOL.