Miscellaneous

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An article from an American!

Where is New Orleans located? Africa ... no ... South America ... no ... in Korea ... no ... I give up ...

Aha. I am not really unhappy with Skype. The only thing is that the sound quality, especially to real phones is sometimes not really acceptable. So let's try the new and much promising Gizmo.

... First tests did not really succeed. Neither one of us saw that we were being called and there is no instant messaging, so it can't beat Skype yet. Chat is just the thing I use most with Skype :-).

Actually I thought, as a friend just told me shortly, that programming is just a temporary thing, and that we all will quit sooner or later. But when I read this there was a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. JoelOnSoftware's company seems to be the paradise for programmers.

The about page is really one that attracts one to work there. Not only because every desk has dual LCD :-). Actually it's more because the job sounds like a challenge. First you have to pass the interview, and you know those people you talk to know what they are talking about (it happened to me some times, that that was not the case). Only the best geeks around you, people who you can learn from, and may be there is also a tiny little corner where you can play a part in and move something forward. Over time you develop a knowledge that then helps you and the others to simply work better, faster and at a higher level. Not only a higher level of quality but also as a programmer. I notice very often that I take the step back way to little times. I am so focused that I loose focus. Sometimes I get so frustrated, because I think I am stuck in a dead end.

I need challenges in live, they are simply the salt in the soup. No actually they are much more than just salt. It is so boring to always do the same stuff. I always need challenging problems. Hey, I learned Python 3 months ago, now I even forgot all the PHP I did for quite a couple of years :-) ... Just keep moving!

The MDR-A44 is one of those things that I use every day without thinking about it. It just works and I don't waste a thought about using it, it doesn't break and only does what it shall do, whereever and whenever I expect it to.
I have this headphone already for some years and I am using them quite a lot, especially lately.

You can fold them so they are really small and fit in a little spot in your bag. I think they were not really expensive, but I don't remember really. The cable never broke, as it usually happens with headphones.

Sorry Sony, but I am not going to buy new headphones, the old one is just the right product and it never breaks. Thank you!

Picture (c) idealo.de

The new iTunes 4.9 has this Podcast feature. And? Yep, that's what I thought too.
Ok, I was always wishing for listening to news instead of reading them. But rather in the way that I click a written news and it is read while I keep on surfing. Anyway, I thought I might try this new hip thing the Podcast. So I searched for some technical stuff and found this nice Pro::PHP podcast. Well I have to say, listening to a person talking rather than a computer does definitely attract more of my attention. It is easier to just switch off when a machine is talking with a constant monotony.

But why I actually started to write this was, that iTunes really surprised me positively. I had started to listen to the interview with Wez Furlong on my laptop. Then I copied it onto my iPod shuffle and when I turned it on this morning to search (that's what you are doing all the time with this dumb USB stick) for this interview it continued from where I stopped listening to it on my laptop! Wow!!! This is cool and just what I wanted. I was very positively surprised.

I just read about SIP here.

SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, and is one of many ways to do Voice over the Internet Protocol, but its applications reach far beyond mere Voice.

Will Skype support it soon? Will it spread at all? Sounds good, but Skype just kicks ass currently.

If there is a way that I can achieve the result with one click less it's worth the effort. All my tools for working are optimized to provide their functionality at my finger tips within no time. The worst thing is switching forth and back between mouse and keyboard, somehow I have the impression that this is one of the things that makes me waste most of the time. I am trying to lose as little time as possible switching between applications, searching for dialogs, opening files, reloading/rerunning scripts, reloading browser pages, etc. I am wasting enough time online without really doing something productive, I don't need to lose time additionally doing things that are unproductive anyway.

I always try to create shortcuts APPLE+ALT+RIGHT/LEFT - for switching between desktops. when I realise that I am hunting for the same functionality with the mouse multiple times a day. The system-wide shortcuts are those that I guess I am using most of the times. For those applications that (can) open mutliple windows the shortcut APPLE+"<" or APPLE+SHIFT+"<" is very handy. It switches between the current application's windows. I tried to unify the navigation and handling of tabs in the browsers and editors to those:

• APPLE+SHIFT+RIGHT/LEFT - go one tab right/left
• APPLE+"W" - close current tab
• APPLE+"T" - open new tab (only browsers)
• APPLE+"N" - open new window (only browsers).

Of course I made my editors work all the same way, I adopted shortcuts so I don't need to switch in my head when I switch IDEs.
Speaking of IDEs, WingIDE (a commercial Python IDE) does an extraordinary nice job in some places. It even shows an auto-completion command line mode for opening files, when I click APPLE+"O". After I opened a file and want to open another one it only shows the last used path, not the old filename. Very good! Optimized until the last bit! If you click TAB for auto-complete and there is only one result it automatically opens the file, that save you the Return, cool!

I have seven different virtual desktops provided by Desktop Manager simply because I realized it is much faster switching desktops than searching the application I want to jump to using ALT+TAB. The desktops I use most are surely the editor desktop (number 5, normally occupied by WingIDE or Zend IDE) and the dev-desktop (number 4, to the left of the editor, so just one click APPLE+ALT+LEFT away), which runs either the browser with the page(s) I am working on or as currently the shell for running the scripts. Lately I was also using the second dev-desktop (number 6) which ran a WinXP under Virtual PC, since I needed some Win-Software to run.
The other virtual desktops group applications of the same type and the one I use most is always on top. Those desktops contain the following

• one - chat, ICQ, Skype, etc.
• two - E-Mail, RSS Feed
• three - Browser windows
• four - dev screen
• five - editor
• six - dev screen 2, CVS Client
• seven - OpenOffice.org
• eight - spare just when I need an entire desktop

Using Exposé comes in handy once in a while too. My lower right desktop corner shows me all the windows I have opened on the current desktop (Exposè's: F9). I actually only use that feature when I have one hand on the mouse or when the way using APPLE+TAB (or APPLE+SHIFT+TAB) is too long to get to the desired window. F11 is the other Exposé feature I use, more or less rarely. Actually only when I really need to do something on the desktop, and that is (almost) only when I have downloaded something. Safari just always puts it there, which is ok, because then it doesn't bother me with the "save as" dialog. Just for completeness, the upper right corner of the desktop triggers the screen saver, which I always need when I go for lunch :-). There it would be nice if I could set a delay time after which the screensaver starts, because sometimes I move the mouse in this corner by accident and then the screensaver starts and I have to login again. May be Apple adds this tiny feature.

Does this interest someone :-) ?
In case it does: This was just a general overview, I plan to continue this article showing some more in depth optimized ways for working, esp. for developing. Just let me know if you got better ideas and ways for "efficiency at work".

The line endings problem, I had just started to forget about it, but reality got me back. There are still different OSes where each seems to know it better than the other one and has to have a different EOL. I only need to convert the line endings properly. Actually I don't want to it should be done for me, but this intelligence is still missing.

I like working with Python and I have even written it in Python (just because I had no online connection), but hey - why invent the wheel again? I thought I had unix2dos installed, but it seems not. And Fink doesn't know it either. But as usual there is a macosxhint for it, the program called flip, does it all in one. LineBreak Converter does even have a GUI.

I was trying to find out if there is anyone reading some of the articles I write. I know that I am not the born writer ... Anyway, so I was looking around, and on my way I stumbled across blogstats.de (I can hear the people laughing: "you didn't know that?", I had heard about it, but never did care) and I was just looking how my blog did :-) Not really a top 1 Million blog, hehe! I thought: Ok, lets have a look at the Top 100 blogs. And may be I can learn how to push it. All those top 100 they have a article/link ratio of about 1/2, some even 1/8. That means eight links per article. Seems like they are writing articles to link things, or do they think about their stats when posting?

I will keep writing just what I feel like and I will not start writing for a higher rank, even though I was tempted for a second :-).

Oh yes, complaining is so easy ... so I keep going

So I stumbled across this article by Jeffrey Veen, which I think hits the nail on the head exactly where I felt it had to be hit! I am looking for a CMS for my own homepage for already about three months, I have tried several: Mambo, Contenido, Drupal, etc. (Typo3 is too difficult for me). But I didn't find the CMS where I simply install > create a page > write content > look at the page > create navigation and start at creating a page again. Or as Jeffrey says

I want to feel successful with your system within a few minutes

The CMS I want shall not bother me with any kind of slang

I don’t know what a portlet is. Or a component, module, block, or snippet. The last system I evaluated had something called “mambots” which, to me, sounded like robotic assistance for breast-feeding.

What it shall do is offer a simple start-here way, which leads me to my first page. May be using a wizard-like approach. Later on after I have been using some standard template, to at least look at my content, I might start modifying the layout and design. Thanks to JavaScript there would be so many possibilities to offer easy layout editing. Most people don't need much more than choosing from default pieces for their layout and adjusting the colors. At least I would be more than happy with that. You might say this is not CMS task anymore, I think it is, but that's another discussion.

I keep seaching, any hints?