Motivation

I'm analysing some things happening in my life and wondering how... well, subjective and isolated from environment certain things could be.

A good example is a car. You buy a new car and you start adjusting it the way you like: you buy wheels, suspension, maybe audio etc etc, you have a long list of things you want to install like silicon hoses, gauges, consider buying some new wheels and so on. There are of course a lot of cars better then yours and you surely can afford some of them, but you don't think about that. But one day a simple thought kicks you in a head: "I NEED this car". So you decide to sell your car and buy a new one; probably not now, probably not even this month, but you're sure you'll do it soon. So... nothing has changed in the environment. Just a simple idea in your head kills your passion in a second without any obvious changes in the environment and you cannot do anything about that.

It scares me a little when I think about it and subconsciously I apply these thought to my programming job: what if my attitude to the certain projects or people are caused more by some ideas in my head than the environment? Well, there is nothing new in this thoughts and this subject is covered in a psychology, but despite of that it's really hard to find own base sometimes.

project's webpage updates automation

Currently I'm reading "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master" book. And while its contents seem quite obvious and natural to me, by repeating "DRY/automate things" stuff again and again it forces my mind to re-think about possible ways of automation of various aspects of my activity.

I have a number of small projects, which are not very popular, but I prefer to keep a page for them just in case if they will be useful for somebody. However, I never liked updating web-sites because it's boring (like: ftp or ssh, edit files, re-check, edit again, you know). So after reading this book I decided to try to automate that too. Recently I moved my small pymgsrc project - a command line client for imgsrc.ru photo hosting - to github and wrote a simple script for the website update. The way it works is:

- Build a release distfile
- Load template for website (single html) page, replace %%VERSION%% with actual version (in order to update download links and info about the latest version available) and replace %%CHANGELOG%% with HTMLfied (using simple sed expression) ChangeLog entires
- scp resulting distfile and webpage to the hosting
- Viola, all done! Using only one command.

I'm very pleased with the script and that I don't have to bother with HTML editing anymore, at least while I didn't decide to alter template.

I guess the hardest part of the automation is to find pieces of work which could be automated, because sometimes you do stuff and don't understand that it could be automated, but when you finally automated it it starts to look pretty natural and you wonder why you haven't noticed it earlier.

gmail generation

Gmail got extremely popular about 2-3 years ago. That's probably because of kinda simple and at the same time powerful web interface it has. Even my mother has a gmail account these days and uses it all the time and has no problem with it at all.

But there's a bad, very bad thing about it: it makes people format messages awfully. It's been written in various places that default quoting method is top-quoting, which is really annoying in most of the time. Moreover, people who read mails sent by normal mail clients like mutt, have problems with viewing them. Because text placed after a quoted message will by most likely formatted as a quotation as well by gmail. And inline quotation must be a real PITA for gmail users.

Moreover, it forces people to over-quote because it leaves all messages from the thread, not the last one.

As a result, most e-mail threads in which gmail users take part look like: several lines on message and then lots of lines of the previous messages quoted.

It's really painful to read and I guess anti-gmail campaign would be more actual than ascii ribbon campaign these days.

PS Actually not gmail, but it's formatting, because in general service seems to be OK.

MacOS X first impressions

By occasion I had to develop stuff for iPhone whole this week and therefore used MacBook as a primary computer. I've never used MacOS before except that once I've tried to install Hackintosh on my laptop but I could not used it because it didn't support neither wifi nor ethernet.

So, well, MacOS X. It seems very hard to use in default configuration. Like, MacBook screensize is 13.3" (or something like that, lazy to check), considering that it's weird that the dock consumes so much screen space. I don't know how is it supposed to be usable, because the menu bar + window title + dock in default size consumes almost 1/4 of the screen space, it's weird. The only option is to set it's size to minimum and make it auto-hide.

Window manager also seems to be kinda unusual. The first strange thing is how spaces (or whatever it's called) are implemented. I wonder why "Alt-Tab" shows me windows from all spaces instead of windows from the current space only. I was told it's possible to configure it, but I don't spot such option in the preferences. I also cannot find how to move a window from one space to another.

Next disappointment is xcode, and first of all, it's editor. It feels like notepad with the only difference that it has syntax highlighting. For some reason, in the default configuration when you hit 'build and go' button it doesn't just to the first error/warning line in the sources. Seems to be kinda weird as well... Other stuff made me curious as well, for example, I wasn't able to find an easy way to rename a project.

I don't know if xcode is positioned as IDE, probably is, but it looks like it's missing a lot of useful features available in other IDEs, for example I wasn't able to find any refactoring stuff there, while e.g. Idea has great support of various refactoring stuff.

As for hardware, keyboard is weird in macbook. The thing that makes me feel uncomfortable is the "fn" key located in usual place of "ctrl" key. Space between the keys are also kinda large and it's unusual as well.

Now I have an impression that OSX is not OS of my choice, I'm happy with freebsd/openbox or linux/openbox at least and the only interesting thing to me in osx is their API, esp. the UI part of it, because it looks like it's way better than for example QT or GTK+. ObjC is also quite interesting, I think I'll play with it in the future.

first post, yay

So I've created _another_ blog. I've had (and still have) a twitter account and realized it's fun to have such a thing because you can write various stuff which is only interesting for you and at the same time train an English. But twitter is not the best service for it because it limits post length to 140 chars or something like that, which is obviously not enough for a good rant.

Other funny thing about twitter is that it looks like companies follow twitter results, probably they subscribe to search results on google, or something like that, but once you write something like "$product suck!" somebody who represents "$product" starts following you and I don't feel like I like it.

So let's see what's going on here.