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  • 1 min read

Woohoo for Argentina and all, but, what about the Philippines?

@jonasbagas: Repro health, check. Divorce, check. Same-sex marriage, check. Argentina - 3; Philippines - 0.

me: If the current people in power have anything to say about it (and they have everything to say about it), we'll stay at 0.

@crazyangelblue: If this country is decided on staying in the Middle Ages, could we at least have proper taverns and traveling minstrels?

me: Oh no, no, no. They come with tax collectors that go door-to-door! I'd have to join Robin Hood and his Merry Men!

me: On the other hand... Mmmm... Robin Hood and the Merry Men...

  • 2 min read

Follow-up to the Emacs saga

In Momentary Inf-IDE-lity, I tried to express my thoughts as I tried to find a full-time replacement for Emacs when I'm writing PHP. On a follow-up post, So much for cheating on Emacs, I related the pretty much dismal results of said search.

At this point, I've pretty much given up.

I've been using Emacs for about a decade now, coming from using Vim and then UltraEdit-32 before that. So, as you can probably imagine, my fingers are pretty much used to working with Emacs.

I suppose a large part of my desire to have a stand-in for Emacs is my deep and absolute loathing of PHP. It's inelegant, it's a crock, it's a band-aid slapped on a duct tape held together by bailing wire and spit.

Except for the part that it's what's letting me pay the bills and put food on the table.

But, still, I thought I could rid Emacs with the crap attendant with supporting PHP. Not Emacs' fault, mind you: even the most elegant, beautiful vase becomes near-worthless once you've decided to use it as a shit-receptacle.

So, anyway, until and unless I find an editor that's:

  • reasonably lightweight (Emacs takes a lot of flak for being so damned heavy, but stock Emacs starts up faster than stock gVim on my machine),
  • has support for Emacs keybindings,
  • can do multiple modes in a single file,
  • can work with Xdebug as a remote debugging client; and
  • is free software

then I'll have to deal with having the evil-but-necessary PHP scaffolding to support my favorite habit: living.

(Maybe I'll break down and keep a copy of XEmacs installed. Hey, at least it meets all of my requirements-- er, except for the Xdebug one. Still...)

  • 3 min read

A few weeks ago, I managed to convince my client to switch to Bzr.

It was an involved process: not really hard, but there were a lot of stuff that needed to be done, and that took time. We're still in the process of settling down and getting adjusted to the new workflow. Nonetheless, the switch took real effort, and, again, it's not even completely done yet at this stage.

So, I suppose, I shouldn't be suprised if it turns out I'm going to be a client-less freelancer after I mention that I'm seriously considering switching to git.

Why? Two words: tool support. git, being the bearer of the distributed version control Kool-Aid, has a lot of mindshare amongst both free and proprietary developers. That means git users an attractive demographic to target.

Don't get me wrong: I love Bazaar to bits. I'm using it personally right now, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future—although I do use Mercurial to manage my Arch User Repo contributions). I've even contributed some minor code to it (use your browser's inline find to search for my name).

And big projects use it, too; Ubuntu uses (and started the development of) it, so does MySQL, and it's the official SCM of the GNU Project. So it's not as if I'm striving to work with an unknown niche product.

But, from my point of view, git has trumped Bazaar.

At first, Bazaar had ease of use on its side. I didn't care that it took a while starting up on my then–6-or-7 year old desktop: as long as I didn't have to learn the mystical voodoo mojo git required of me, I'd have laid down on lava. I didn't care about speed of execution: I was used to things crawling on my rig. But, as time went by, git snuck up on Bazaar's number one item on its brag sheet.

Fast forward to today, and even former Visual Basic programmers can use git effectively, while Bazaar's list of commands have grown and grown to the point that I couldn't figure out how to use them properly without consulting the documentation.

Oh, and don't get me started on Bazaar's documentation. WTH, Bazaar devs? Where's my how-to-install-PQM-on-your-servers guide? Is that even possible? Or do I have to deploy Launchpad locally, too?

git, of course, took the douchey route (or, you know, the open source route, depending on your sensibilities, I suppose): the Intarwebs has written its documentation for it. Hell, sometimes, I'd search for instructions on how to do something in Bzr, only to come up with instructions for git.

Obviously, I haven't drank the git Kool-Aid. But if I were to approach this pragmatically (as, I suppose, I should), I'd pick git in a heartbeat: It's faster, has more tools, more mindshare, better integration, and, hell, let's face it, it looks better in a resume. So it doesn't play nice with Windows: I don't play nice with Windows.

The trouble is, how do I approach the client regarding this, when we're barely two months into Bazaar mode?

Of course, as noted above, I'll still be using Bazaar personally. Why? That's easy.

I drank the Bazaar Kool-Aid.

  • 1 min read

Motorola is willing to break the phone they just sold you

Once upon a time, I was a rabid Motorola fanboy. Even back when Nokias were all the rage (well, they still are, but to a lesser degree), I wanted only Motorolas. Tough sons-of-bitches, no-frills, reliable as hell.

I stopped when they started with making color phones that were pretty much overpriced kids' toys.

Good thing I did.

Original article

  • 2 min read

So much hate for Intel right now

I've just come back from a reboot, because every single screen draw seemed like it was being done by an inbred bastard offspring of my first video card ever, a 2MB PCI vid card with an SiS chipset. Also, I noticed the status bars of my window manager were composed primarily of garbled shit (add to that the fact that my status bars are colored brown, and you get a complete picture).

In a previous post, I mentioned wanting to stick with an older, more stable version of the Intel video driver.

I never managed it.

To do so, I would've had to downgrade (or, worse, rebuild), aside from the driver, my X, and everything that accompanied it. I seriously do not have time for something like that, nor would I want to do it, even if I did.

I'm not sure if the garbled crap I was seeing is a bug in awesome (it looks like awesome's failing to clean up after itself, and ends up trying to draw on a dirty slate, as it is), but, at this point, I don't really care that much. Plus, I don't really want to talk about my window manager all that much, since I'm still pissed at the switch to Lua when awesome 3.x came out.

Right now, I'm just so very, very, very pissed off at Intel.

Back before this, I preferred Intel cards to anything else. They were relatively cheap, and often good enough for anything I wanted to do (I'm a code monkey by disposition, not a gamer; and I've got my Wii for games). Plus, and this was the most important bit for me, they've had free drivers from (I think) the beginning.

No mucking around with blobs of unknown quality, the way you had to do with nVidia cards (I still have nightmares about setting up dual-screen on that ghoddamned binary driver).

Nowadays, Intel's joined the shit-cards list for me. The desktop PC (a hand-me-down from my kid brother) in my room, with an ATI vid card, hasn't given me any grief at all whatsoever. Same with the workstation I had in a previous gig. Dual-screen was a relative cinch, and, once I had it set, I never had to worry about it (except when it died, and I had to replace it with an nVidia card).

If ever my GNU/Linux install gives me even half a reason to do so, I'm wiping my drives and putting FreeBSD on it, post-haste.

  • 1 min read

Why I should've installed Ubuntu on my mom's laptop, instead

me: Oh, hey, I'm setting up Skype on your laptop, okay?

Mom: Why Skype?

me: So you get better video chats (sotto voce: also, because GyachI sucks and should die a million painful deaths). Oh, also, did you happen to notice your laptop was doing stuff by itself? Hehehe...

Mom: What do you mean?

me: Apps launching, the cursor moving... I'm telling you, you're laptop's possessed!

Mom: On that note, why does it say that 'demons' are loading?

me: Huh? What're you talking about?

Mom: When it starts up, it says something like 'Loading demons' or whatever.

me: Uh. They're daemons. Meaning servers.

Mom: You're sure?

me: Um. Nope. They're demons, alright. Told you, your laptop's possessed. :P

  • 3 min read

So much for cheating on Emacs

Tried Eclipse PDT, Komodo Edit and NetBeans.

  • Eclipse wouldn't build properly on my Arch install; the build recipe's broken.
  • Komodo Edit lacks debugging support, which, for me, leaves nothing but a sluggish, bloated editor (remember, this is coming from an Emacs user).
  • And NetBeans... Well, I didn't even get around to trying it out, since the ugly, ugly, ugly fonts scared me away.

Seriously, what the hell's the matter with Java's Swing?

I checked out workarounds to get Swing to acknowledge that my setup, in fact, was capable of displaying non-ugly fonts. While the splash screen readily agreed, the rest of the platform was... er, rather in denial.

I figured, "Well, maybe it's my JRE," since I using the one that came with the free (as in freedom) OpenJDK, instead of Sun's official JRE. So I tried switching.

Lo. Java apps refused to even acknowledge that my setup can even display anything aside from a blank frame!

I know, I know (I just plain forgot), it's a bug in Sun's Java environment, which, if I remember correctly, is triggered when you're using a non-reparenting window manager.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to change my perfectly great X11 setup (see screenshot) just to kowtow to a damned IDE.

(I have a dual-screen setup, with xrandr displaying the laptop's screen "below" that of my LCD (damned Intel bugs...); on the laptop, I have Vinagre connected to my mom's laptop, on which I'm trying (and failing) to get GyachI working.)

So. I ripped out Sun's JRE and put OpenJDK back in again.

Anyway. Komodo Edit. Laudable effort, especially building on XUL. I like that. A lot, actually.

Except it really doesn't work for me.

Maybe their full-blown IDE works better (or at all). But it's $295 per license. And it's not entirely free (only the parts it has in common with Komodo Edit are).

By not working, I don't mean that it doesn't run (it does). I mean, it doesn't cut it for me. As I said earlier, without the debugging feature, all I'm left with is a bloated editor. And I don't mean the startup time, since I always keep my editor running and, usually, the only time I ever start an editor up is after I've logged in.

Komodo Edit is bloated because everything I try to do with it involves some kind of lag. Scrolling (either with the scroll button on my trackball or through the scrollbar) takes a while before responding. Switching tabs entails a similar lag. Worse yet, typing in a whole bash of characters (I usually hit about 85-90 WPMs after the coffee kicks in) produces an impossible-to-miss one or two second delay before the first input reflects on the screen.

As for Eclipse, well... As I mentioned in my previous post, I've had more than a couple of people insist that I try it for the past few years.

I suppose we're just not meant to be together.

Although... Well, I've found pre-built Arch packages for PHPEclipse (which is supposedly a whole 'nother beast that the Eclipse PDT I tried out before).

So maybe I will have something to play with tomorrow.

We'll see.

UPDATE: I tried playing with PHPEclipse tonight (past midnight, so I guess that qualifies as "tomorrow"). It couldn't handle one source file that had a mix of PHP, HTML and JavaScript. Emacs, by default, can't do this either. But with nXhtml, Emacs just takes it in stride.

  • 2 min read

Momentary inf-IDE-lity

Forgive me, Emacs, for I am only human.

I'm in the process of downloading, building and installing PHP Development Tools. When that's done, I'm going to try and see if I can do all my PHP-related development with it.

I'm sorry, I truly am.

It's just that I'd like to see if I'd be more productive if I could have an integrated XDebug client, and I found myself wishing a while ago for a listing of declared function names. Also, trying to make multiple modes work with you have been causing me headaches. And when I did finally manage to get nXhtml with its abominable MuMaMo default font-locking faces, you almost blinded me.

Sure, there's Geben, which, I'll admit, does soften my position somewhat. But then there's CEDET, which makes my argument ten times more forceful.

Look at it this way, Emacs: I'm taking a break from us, trying to find time to collect my thoughts, and figure out what you really mean to me. And, besides, we can finally get rid of all the PHP-related cruft I've forced upon you through the years and get back to a purer, more elegant workflow.

Of course I'll still go back to you! We've been together for so long, I can no longer define who I am without putting it in terms of my relationship with you. A couple of years from now, when the world has moved on from the shitty languages like PHP, we'll look back on this episode with a knowing smile and just look at the far-off sunset while holding keys.

But, then... If things work out better betwen me and Eclipse... Well, we'll always have Scheme and Python.

UPDATE: Er, it seems Eclipse and I truly weren't meant to be: Eclipse PDT packages on Arch Linux are broken. Considering I've had people recommending it to me since before it was fashionable to use it, I'm thinking this is going to be my last attempt to try it out (every other attempt has also failed). Anyway, I'm going to be trying out NetBeans, instead.

  • 1 min read

Kitchen Myths

Or, more appropriately: Things you wouldn't believe if only you had listened to your grade school science teacher.

Source