A quick hobix.el idea:
Allow for unfinished posts in something like blog-root/drafts and only copy them over when the user says they’re finished. Create the created field at that point, so that the blog shows the post being posted when it was finished instead of when it was started.
Thanks to Org-Mode/Org-Blog for the idea!
I’ve started using Last.fm for music. It seems like a great service, with recommendations like Pandora. The difference is that Last.fm uses other people’s tastes instead of Pandora’s “music genome.” To make the best of the service, it seems, I should always be hooked into Last.fm when I’m listening to music.
At home, it’s easy: they have an iTunes plugin that pings the servers whenever I listen to a song. It will even update with what I listened to on my iPod while I’m away. At work, things are more difficult, since I run Linux and can’t use iTunes. I can listen to recommendations and such with either the Last.fm client or the flash player they have integrated into the site, but I haven’t figured out what to do if I want to listen to my own music.
The problem is compounded by my desire to track when I listen to particular tracks. My iPod is too small to hold all of my music so I’ve set up a somewhat complicated array of playlists to load music based on my ratings, the last time a song was played and whether a song has recently been added to my library. Again, anything I listen to on the iPod gets updated when I plug it into the computer, but anything I play on my machine at work is completely ignored.
What it comes down to is this: I want a way to listen to my iTunes library when I’m not at home. Now that I have an iMac at home (and can carry my PowerBook around with me) this would be solved by either 1) synchronizing iTunes between the PowerBook and the iMac or 2) being able to listen to my main iTunes library remotely (over the internet).
Got any [suggestions][3]?
[3]: mailto:rain@xidus.net?subject=Remote iTunes
Never, ever forget to stay DRY. Getting wet is just too painful.
Unless you haven’t been paying attention to me for the past year or so (who am I kidding, you haven’t) you’ll know that I have a thing for this crazy language called Ruby and the MVC framework that started the Ruby Craze, Ruby on Rails.
I’m always searching for new resources for learning new things about Ruby and Rails and I’ve recently stumbled on Jamis Buck’s blog the { bucklogs :here }. From his own about blurb, “Jamis Buck is a software developer who has the good fortune to be both employed by 37signals and counted among those who maintain the Ruby on Rails web framework,” so he knows his shit when it comes to Ruby and Rails.
Just now I’m reading his post Skinny Controller, Fat Model, which is a good description of how MVC should work. Judging by this this post and the others I’ve seen there, his blog is a good resource for Ruby, Rails and general web-appy thinking.
Hooray! The bike works! I had to replace a ton of wiring and connectors and make lots of things play nice with each other and then I want for a ride last night for two hours! Hooray!
Really, I just wanted to post something to the blog. Hooray!
It seems I always learn about a new blog by looking at my referrals. Seth started a blog. Now, I’m all for clever names and whatnot but he’s going to be in big trouble when Bill O’Reilly hears about this.
Word has wacky wacky Windows key bindings. Why can’t it be Emacs?
Hobix uses YAML for its entry format, which is all well and good, but it introduces a small problem: syntax highlighting and indentation don’t work well in Emacs. See, YAML is nice in that it’s all free form and human readable/writable, but it makes it hard to figure out what the indentation should be for a given bit of YAML.
Take the following bit of YAML:
--- !hobix.com,2004/entry author: [jterk] created: 2006-07-13 20:18:02 -04:00 content: > Hobix uses YAML for its entry format. _
Imagine, if you will, that the cursor is sitting where the _ is, and I hit the TAB key. In generic YAML, with no specification of how this particular data should be layed out, Emacs has no way of knowing what I want to do next. I might want to continue the block of text corresponding to the content tag, which would use the same indentation as the line beginning with “Hobix”. Or I could want to start a new tag, in which case the indentation of the line would be the same as that of the content tag.
Even after I’ve typed the next thing, and Emacs can figure out if it’s regular text or a new tag, it still can’t indent. I could be making a compound data type for content. Yeesh!
To add insult to injury, tag identifiers (those guys like author:) can have white space as part of the tag. In fact, as far as I can see, there isn’t much that can’t be part of a YAML tag. This particular little tidbit makes syntax highlighting more or less hit or miss. But that might just be ignorance on my part.
I think, however, that I have a solution. I can impose an insufferable dictatorship on hobix-mode (when I finally get around to it): if the mode knows that only a few specific tags will show up at the beginning of the file and that after that it’s all gravy, things will be much easier. It’s like I’ll be letting the emacs mode know what the schema is beforehand, or something. Imagine that! There’s still a small problem of in line html, and the (for now, anyways) Textile syntax that I’ve complained about. Indentation for those isn’t quite so cut and dry … I wonder if I can detect what sort of “region” the cursor is in from hobix-mode and set a mode for that region? Hmm.
For a while now I’ve been trying to think of some sort of business that I can start. I love my job – the people I work with and the work I get to do, not to mention the benefits, are great – but a bit of me knows that I won’t be satisfied forever. I also know that I’m spoiled; I won’t be able to handle working at a large company and it will be difficult to go to a less amiable work environment.
The solution then is to start my own company. Then I will be able to set my own hours, work with people I like and work on interesting projects. I’ve come up with a couple of ideas but it’s very difficult to focus on one. Mostly it’s an issue of not believing that a product or service will fly; it’s very easy to think that an idea is silly and won’t work and, subsequently, abandon the idea all together. To start, I need to bite the bullet and just try something; if it fails, I’ll still be OK.
The advantage of trying something now is that I can do it in my spare time. I can craft something without the risk of dropping everything and, potentially, losing my shirt. I don’t need to look for investors or co-founders because I can take my time and do it all myself. It’s time to pick an idea and run with it. The fear of failure shouldn’t deter me.