Devauld.ca

Well, it has been forever since I've uplifted this site. I originally edited HTML by hand on wesdevauld.com. Then I moved to a perl based CGI script that would read out of a flat file that I kept on the server. Version 3 entailed a move to php and using a mysql database, that should have had more backups than it did.

Now, it is time for the next iteration. I was previously wrapped up in being in control of all of my net based content. I wanted to run my own server, hatching e-mails, providing web pages, and protecting myself from whatever the haxx0rs wanted to put onto my machine. But now, that is all changed.

I sat infront of my server and typed in the required emerge -up world to see what was required to bring myself up to date. I was astonished to see that I required over 100 individual packages to be upgraded to keep up to date. In that instant, I decided that I would quit being the greedy hoarding capitalist I was, and trust the internet to hold onto my possessions.

I've moved to a different host to ensure that my plethora of web sites are available all the time. I've moved away from maintaining a webserver when there are others that do it so much better. Instead of piling up byte upon byte of picture data, I've decided to let flickr deal with the details.

After I installed Typo, I spent a good deal of time bogging down my computer uploading the 450+ photos to flickr. I didn't quite get it right the first time, so I ended up killing my computer and its connection a couple times.

I'm down to the nitty gritty now, and I need to push over my old entries, and the pictures associated with them, as well as a couple comments, and I'm all finished.

Frequency has been lacking, and moving backwards through time it would appear the only thing keeping me on the internet is PhotoFriday. I thought I'd try to be a bit more informative, so I'm getting back out there a whole day early.

The bathroom has come to the infamous 98% completion. The tile is all set and sealed, everything is hung, nailed or siliconed into place, and the entire thing looks like it belongs in another house. The missing peice is a mirror to hang over a new hole where a medicine cabinet used to reside. It could have been finished weeks ago, but I"ve been dragging my feet on the promise of a 2x convex mirror that I could get for an excellent deal. One the whole thing is finished, I'll have a pile of pictures, so I can show before and after.

I can remember vividly the switch from my renovations being the largest time sync in my life to another, completely different demon. It was a Thursday night.

Glen had been ranting the whole day about the new Oblivion he had played on his 360, and I, like a fool, fell for it hook line and sinker. I have been yearning for a good RPG stint since Fallout left me with a big gapping hole to fill. I learned that Bethesda had earned the rights to continue the Fallout franchise, and with that knowledge coupled with Glen's glowing reviews, I decided to find out what kind of role playing game these guys made.

As it turns out: The Crack Kind!

The game is engrossing. It feels a lot more like a sandbox game than anything else I've ever encountered. I know, from talking to Glen, that we are playing two completely different games. His strategies, and goals are different, and hence he sees a completely different part of the universe they have created for us. The game is very witty, easy to use, fun to play and is absolutely beautiful and monsterous. San Andreas had a big world to roam around in, but it pales in comparison to the detail they have placed in Oblivion. There is just stuff EVERYWHERE and the game uses the Havok physics engine, enabling you can interact realistically with just about anything. And, I don't think I can overstate, just how purdy this game looks.

This week has been frantic at work. I have a deadline next week, and I'm taking a few days off during the week, so I've been trying to get my work done before this weekend.

People that don't work in a programming field, probably can't comprehend the difficulty in estimating and finishing tasks on time. Our work is also quite foreign to them, as a simple bug, that requires a dozen or so keystrokes to fix could take weeks to find. Unlike trade jobs where you know how long it will take you to do something, an estimate for the time required to design, implement and test a system is a lot more soft. The last 10% of your project will take you 90% of the time. Experience helps, but the nature of our work means that you could screw everything up with a single character out of place, and thousands and thousands of problems can be fixed in one place.

Leading into the weekend, the mother unit is coming down to see her baby boy and help me with some tiling. My colour sence is pathetic, so I need some womanly advice on colours for my floors to make sure they go with my walls, and vanity. Black and yellow go together don't they? The time off, coupled with my family's ability to really tuck down and get stuff done ensure that my home will be entirely different by the middle of next week. I'll take some before and after photos to share.

Warning: The geek content in the post is extremely high. If you are not [E---,E+++] or have no idea what that means, perhaps you should stop with just looking at the pretty train.

The morning started out as most do during the week. Up out of bed, into the bathroom to cover the 3 S's and brush the teeth, followed by a zap in the shower, some breakfast and onto the commute to work.

Once in the office, I had to roll down to the kitchen to grab some health food before I talked to Neil about some photography. Shortly, Karen stopped by and asked for some help getting a automatic test to function. Since Karen is pretty easy to look at and I'm very familiar with what she's testing, I wandered down to her candy filled office to help her out.

Normally, I let people pilot their own rig and play advocate of the answer and just ask questions, but we ran into a communication problem where I needed to clarify through keyboard entry. Immediately the problem became very, very clear.

You see, Karen resides on that side of the *NIX world that uses the editor knows as emacs whereas I am a user of vi, or at least it's upgraded cousin. The results were disasterous!

The escape sequence to escape insert mode doesn't sit well with the other editor. As a matter of fact, most emacs users should disable the esc key altogether in order to avoid a random vi user from opening up secrert windows and overwriting buffers. I felt like a new driver learning to drive a manual transmission. I couldn't get anything done!

I was surprised. I was originally introduced to emacs in school as a replacement to the university standard pico editor. I loved the flexibility, which I now recognize as bloatedness, of the editor, and became rather good bending it to my will. I participated in a good deal of vi vs emacs discussions, and I had a glove thrown down. For a month we would only use the other side's editor, and that was one long January. I diligently researched into the cryptic : commands, spending more time looking through the Vim Reference than actually writing code. Getting used to hitting a single key to do things was a bit disorienting, but after some time the editor grew on me. I was amazed at how much quicker I could get things done, not because emacs did not have the same functionality, but because the way vi did it, made sense.

Where I was shocked, is that when placed back infront of the Extensible Macro System, I was locked right up. I couldn't even pull out the C-x C-s required to write some stuff to the disk. Furthermore, my dependence on vi's modes littered the code with which I was working with all sorts of: :w and :!make install. I felt like a fish out of water.

The argument about which editor is better is older than the world wide web, and will probably never die. Although in doing a little research, I did find this article that makes a great case for both editors, and tells you when each is applicable. Since I write code, and not novels for a living, I'll stick with the better editor