/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.

So, I’m closing in on the end of my first week with Emacs. So far, things are going about as I expected them to be. I have started my own cheatsheet (which I may publish later), and I’ve installed Planner, which is a really great mode for organizing. It depends on a couple of other things, but once installed, it works well. I’m finding that it’s a nice tool as far as work goes when it comes to organization. I haven’t done much real coding in Emacs yet, simply because I’m still looking for a project to do. Coding at work has been slow because I haven’t had time to work on the internal web applications and there hasn’t been an opportunity for a cool bash script lately.

So, what do I have on my list of things to learn?

- Keybindings. This is going to take a while, but once I learn them then I’ll be in good shape

- .emacs. I’m sure there are some settings that some would see as essential. I’ll share mine in an upcoming post.

As far as projects go, I think I might start taking a look around at the open source projects out there and see if there’s something I can do to start getting involved. I think I’ll also work on setting up local source control on this machine to make managing things easier

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.

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.

Here we are, a little less than two weeks until Christmas, and you know what I was wearing last weekend? Shorts and a t-shirt. It’s my first winter in the south, and while it has been rather chilly most of the time, there have been no ice or snow storms, and I think the temperature only got below freezing once or twice overnight so far. I just love it down here.

Not much new to report elsewhere, really. Work is going well. I got a bonus this year along with a great annual review. Family life is excellent, and in general I’m doing fine. I’ve had my moments thinking about my father (welcome to the holidays), but that’s to be expected. This weekend we’re getting the Christmas tree and getting the apartment all Christmas-like. I’m sure I’ll be taking pictures at some point.

On the geek side of things, not much going on. I’m still enjoying Arch Linux, and I’m still playing around with Python a bit, but I haven’t found a project to spark my interest much. I have been working on a couple of things for work, though.