/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

I’m becoming a little annoyed with Emacs now. While it’s been pretty ok to use on a day-to-day basis for notes and other text chores, getting down and actually coding with it is quite, at least to me, annoying. My biggest problem is auto-indent. I can’t seem to shut this feature off to save my life, and it drives me insane. It seems to vary depending on the mode I’m in (php, python, etc), and the modes seem to override the settings in my .emacs file. While I do enjoy planner mode, the coding side of Emacs is basically annoying the heck out of me right now, and with what I’m working on, I’m thinking an IDE is going to suit me better in the long run. I may find the exact formula to change the behavior, but lately I’m not all that interested in that, rather than finding what’s going to be the most comfortable setup for me.

I’ve started messing around with Emacs in the past few days. It’s installed at work and here at home, but I haven’t done a whole lot of anything with it yet. I’ve been working on my .emacs configuration before I go too much further, setting and unsetting some things to get it to my liking. I found an interesting setup called org-planner mode which may end up in me being able to get organized at work *finally*. Time will tell, but I have to get some of the basics down first.

One thing I keep reading is that a lot of people are switching the Control and caps lock keys in their keybindings. It sounds like an interesting idea, and I can’t remember the last time I hit caps lock on purpose. I might go ahead and swap them out. So far, though, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be too big a deal to learn and use.

There’s a lot of talk lately on some of the blogs I read about code editors. I myself have been dealing with finding one that suits me (even if I don’t code all that often anymore), and so far, nothing seems to fit 100% yet. I’ve got a basic understanding of Vim, Emacs and Nano, which are all ok as far as command line utilities go. I think I fall into the IDE category when it comes to coding, so I’ve been playing around with jEdit, Eclipse and most recently OpenKomodo. OpenKomodo seems to work pretty well, and I really like the completion aspect of it, so I think I’m going to stick with it for coding for now. For configuration editing / remote work, I’ll stick with Vim.

My Django experiment is going relatively well. The database model is done, and now I’m at the point where I’m a bit stuck. I’m still learning my way around the framework, so I’m sure I’ll get it with time. What I’m currently dealing with right now is trying to figure out views. The way I understand it so far is that urls.py defines what happens when you go to a particular URL for the project, such as http://project/view/main_page, then in views.py there would be a main_page routine. Part of my hang up right now is the design aspect. In a nutshell, I’m trying to retrofit an old PHP application into Django while not altering it too much. I’m in no hurry to finish this, so I have time. As far as personal projects, I don’t really have any Django-related projects I could work on for personal things, so I’ve been thinking about some ideas I can do in just normal python. PyGame seems rather interesting, and of course I could always find some other project to get into as well. If you have any thoughts on projects looking for a semi-new Python guy, drop me a comment.

I figured that I’m going to start yet another series on my blog entitled “Adventures in Python”. I figure it will motivate me to play around with Python/Django while sharing my experiences with everyone. Keep in mind I’m new when it comes to Python, so my code may not be so pretty.

I had a lot of ambition in 2007 to start coding things again, but as with every year, most of my thoughts came and went. I have learned enough Python to be dangerous, at least, and I’m still pretty OK with Perl, although I barely use it anymore. I’m still messing with a bit of PHP as well since I deal with it at work, but I’ve been thinking a lot about rewriting some of our internal webapps using Django. Problem is that it needs to be maintainable by others in my department, but I’m thinking if I code them right it shouldn’t be too horrible.

As far as personal projects go, there’s not really a whole lot I’ve found to code up. I’ve thought of a couple of things, but never really got into them. I should, though, so I can sharpen my skills. I’ll be working on the work projects at home mostly, but I want to have something I can do for myself, or if nothing else, something else to help out on. Hopefully in 2008 I’ll be a bit more inclined to write more code.