Ok, so you (and by you, I mean jack) will be happy to hear, that I’ve mostly settled on being an emacs user. I mean, I’m not killer good at it, but this evening as I moved back to my Mac exclusively for a few days (I’m writing this during a quick jaunt out of town and my mac is the laptop) I downloaded a GUI version of emacs, because… well, I think the less that’s said the better.

This is strange for me, because for a long time, I thought that moving to linux would be all about an adaptation to vi(m)--for those of you playing along at home, vim is the “competing” text editor to emacs. Emacs was always that overly complicated editor that did too much, and vim’s modal¹ design is kinda brilliant, and I was taken.

But as I’ve said before, vim is great, but it’s not perfect for what I’m doing. My MO in TextMate has been to use it to do as many things as I can. Which is more inline with the way that people tend to use emacs. So I switched (haven’t started to use it for writing emails, yet), and it’s mostly pretty great, but it’s hard to get used to.

I was going to say “it’s just a bit weird,” or “things seem hard to find,” or “functionality isn’t as standardized as it is in TextMate,” but I’m not sure that this is really true. I mean, there are some clear differences between emacs and TextMate, but TextMate is very clearly influenced² by emacs, so it’s not that alien. And the M-x command line makes things really easy to find, so that’s not an issue. So maybe my only complaint is that the various modes for emacs aren’t as consistent as the languages/bundles for TextMate. This might be the case, but it also might be the fact that I don’t edit many different kinds of text, so I’m not a great judge of this.

So while I’m on this subject, let me make a list of the kinds of text files that I edit. Because it’s my blog, and I can:

• Markdown Documents: I use markdown formating a lot (with longlines and flyspell minor modes in emacs). These documents tend to range from about 1,200 to 4,000 words, and I write them for work (technicalish documents) and also my fiction is all written in these kinds of files.
• Blog posts. Also in markdown these are shorter, but in TextMate at least these have email style headers that interface with the blog-posting client. In emacs, I’ve been using these headers (as I don’t like the blogging mode very much.
• Screen Plays. There’s a great mode in emacs for screenplays that doesn’t have some of the nifty completions that the TextMate counterpart has, but I think overall the interface is better.
• Occasional PHP/css/html files. I do websites, this is a necessary thing, and this is the most “programer” thing that I do. Even really sucky text editors do this pretty well. I might also from time to time edit shell scripts and hopefully do some python stuff in the future, but again, not a big issue.
• Outlining/Journaling. I’m not a big “one giant text file” kind of guy, but doing some kind of structured document outside of basic markdown formated text is nice. I’ve been using a “journal” bundle for TextMate for this, and there are a few others.
• Editing LaTeX documents. I haven’t done a lot of this recently, but one of my “things” is using LaTeX to do all of my “production” document editing. For most things I tend to write in markdown and then translate to LaTeX for production, but I have a couple of LaTeX documents and templates that I just do in LaTeX. I need to explore this more, but I’ve touched on it a bit, and I’m a fan so far.

Are there other emacs modes that I should be checking out that I’m not, seemingly, aware of? Thanks in advance!

I’ve had one hell of a week, and at least somewhat understandably, I haven’t been writing very much this past week. Which is really odd for me because I’m always writing. While the cause of this vacation from writing was acute and understandable, this has led me to think about the role of my writing in my day to day life, and while it’s depressing to write about not writing while NaNoWriMo is on, I think it’s worthy fodder for the blog.

When I decided to set aside academe for a while the desire to write flooded back, and in a lot of ways, the fact that I’m reasonably productive in writing fiction has made the fact that I’m not in school much easier for me. At this point in my life, school (and research) is about playing with novel ideas and methodologies, and while on the surface the social sciences and science fiction writing are dissimilar, the truth is that the fiction writing and the social science work draws from the same well. As it were.

Similarly, now that I’m not in school, this blog is an outlet for the kinds of things that might have percolated out in classroom discussions and writing assignments, and keeping this blog flowing is really meaningful and helpful. Truth be told, if I don’t have a chance to write in the blog at least once a week, I find that my thinking becomes somewhat disjointed and disorganized, and I have have a harder time keeping track of projects and ideas. Now I’m not saying “if you’re having trouble with your thinking, blogging will help,” but rather that my thinking and blogging have become linked and interconnected.

So the end result is that without my usual writing has left me feeling sort of distracted and at loose ends.

Thankfully, this past weekend I was able to carve a little bit of time out for myself and get some work done. This is good for the bottom line as I was able to do some day-job work, and good for the soul because I was able to get organized and clear my mind. One of the good things about my current situation, is that because my day-job is writing related in one very real sense even if I don’t write a page of fiction on a given day I’m still a writer. Weird.

Anyway, good luck to anyone out there doing NaNo, I’ll try and post one more writing related post this month, and then I’ll just write, and resist the temptation to wax philosophical.

Onward and Upward!

If there is anything that technologists will remember about 2008--other than the possible impending economic collapse--is that it’s the year of the netbook.¹ I wouldn’t be the first person to say that there’s very little new about the netbook, but it’s also true that there have been a number of advancements in the web and in browsers, and in wifi availability have given this development the critical mass that it needs to really catch on. And it is.

Before I get to the pragmatic stuff about netbook usage, on the theoretical level I think netbooks present an interesting and expansive possibility for Linux-based systems. It’s weird since Linux is really designed to be server software, but it works really well for a device like a net book, but I think the modularity and adaptability of the platform is a huge strength in this area.

But I do have two pragmatic questions about netbooks:

First off, What’s the best netbook for older users? I have someone in mind who’s lamented after my laptops for a while. I’m actually leaning towards the OLPC X-0 which is more than a year old now, but it’s durable, nifty and functional. The Acer One seems to be the default recommendation otherwise, even if the HP mininotes are the ones that I personally like the best.

Secondly, are we to a point that one of these notebooks could replace my laptop? Day-to-day I use my laptop in a very netbookish manner, but I need to be able use it as my primary computer for a couple weeks. Even though I got a new computer this summer, it’s clear that my laptop is going to be needed to feed the family’s obsolescence cycle sooner rather than later and while I’m leaning toward a Lenovo 12 inch ThinkPad/tablet, it is an open debate.

On the one hand, a netbook would be nice and small and portable, and it certainly would do everything that I needed it to do, but I don’t know how comfortable it would be to use for long stretches, and having something that could be a tablet from time to time would be quite good. At the same time, the price can’t quite be beat.

Thoughts? Debate?

Over the past week or two, I’ve been working on a number of side projects that I’ve started to realize as a new and interesting project in and of themselves.

The first project is that I’ve been working on (re)designing a website with/for my friend Scott, who is a composer/voice actor/podcaster type. While he has a lot of HTML skills he’s never done any of the--even very elementary--web-programging (a la the PHP code/templates that wordpress uses) that one needs to do to have nifty dynamic websites.

So I’ve been working with him to use wordpress to build a basic portfolio site and blog. It’s a pretty straightforward kind of a site, but you have to know wordpress pretty well to know how to design a theme so that all of the right content ends up in the right place. I’ve been using wordpress, more or less since the beginning so it’s the kind of thing that I’m pretty good at.

The second project has been to design and implement a version of the tychoish.com theme for a new wordpress installation that I can deploy for various members of my family who want to use wordpress as a note taking platform. While I use a wiki (with a blogging plugin) for this task personally, the editing interface for wordpress along with its metadata system (tagging and categories) makes for a really ideal notebook-solution. There are other features like comments for annotations and revision tracking for storing document history that have been really helpful, and make this a really good solution.

And of course the fact that I’m building these sites around wordpress makes a couple of things possible. First, it’s open source so we can run these notebooks and portfolio sites on our own (or rented) hardware, and the data is easily exportable into a lot of very useful formats if we ever want to change. Second, the software isn’t very resource intensive to run, particularly for lower volume sites like these, so it can run almost anywhere.

The truth is, that the biggest part of both of these projects was talking to the people who would be using the software to figure out what they already did with their existing websites/notebooks, and then figuring out how to do the same thing with the new solution, and finally also learning enough about what they wanted to do to be able to figure out with they might do that they couldn’t do before.

I guess that makes me something of a consultant.

Weird.

Even more wierd is the feeling that I actually like doing this. And I find it ties together a lot of things that I do. My “day-job,” does similar sorts of things (for different kinds of “clients” with different sorts of problems), and what I’ve done thusfar is very much inline with my musings here about open source and productivity, which is kinda cool.

In a weird way, this is very much inline with my initial forays into the web-world which seemed to center around organizing creative types (in the largest sense) on the internet. This was nearly 10 years ago, but the threads are there. That’s something that I’ve realized as I’ve started new projects and new directions recently: even when I think they’re new and novel, I realize that they resonate with things I was working on and thinking about during high school.

Go figure.

I’m finally getting my list of things to do with linux that I’ve heretofore done with OS X down to only a few items. I need to set up xampp for the web development work I use and for hosting my local wiki, and I need to sort out something with RSS reading (which isn’t so much a technological problem as it is a fact that I’m majorly behind and disorganized on RSS). Everything else is either a matter of linux programs being a little rough around the edges (pidgin? really?) or additional things that I never could do with my laptop (eg. fileservering for the house, dyndns, etc.)

At the moment, however, my biggest “linux transition” thought is a workflow issue. Basically I’m thinking about how I’m incorporating both a dual monitor setup and a laptop into my workflow. Because of the way that Awesome works there’s a sense in which both of my monitors really can function as two different computers. Not to mention the fact that I also have this really rather awesome (and capable) laptop.

My first approach to using two monitors was to put them right next to each other, and I arranged my windows such that I put half of all the tasks on each screen an what I found, was that I used the “middle” half of both screens" almost exclusively, rather than balancing my computing evenly across both screens.

So my second strategy has been to position the screens so that I have a primary screen dead in front of my keyboard, and then a secondary screen on my right at a forty five degree angle. The primary screen has things like writing projects (work, fiction, blogging, research) and my email and IM client on the main screen. Then “refrence” things on the second screen, so like the web browser lives there, my notebook (also a web-browser, but to a local site), IRC and microblogging, and the Calendar app all love over there. I’m not sure that this is totally ideal yet, but it’s a good start.

As an aside, I’d love to hear how people with more than one monitor make use of all the extra screen space. Particularly Awesome users.

My second issue/question is that my desk is too small to hold both the new monitors and the laptop, so I tend to have the laptop stacked off to the side and take it down when I want to go in the other room or do something that’s still mac-centric. I wonder how people who have two distinct computers (laptops and desktops) deal with and make use of having two computers. The data synchronization isn’t an issue, I think I have that pretty well sorted out, it’s the work-flow issue. Particularly in a couple of weeks when the computers are functionally equivalent.

Thoughts? Suggestions? I can’t fathom that this is something that people, far smarter and more creative than I, haven’t already solved. I can’t wait to hear it!

Onward and Upward!

I haven’t written one of these journal posts in a long time and I think it’s long overdue.

On the whole I think things in the land of tycho have been really good of late. I’m writing, I’m learning and settling into a new computer and text editor, I’m working (perhaps not enough, but nonetheless), I’m working on an exciting academic project, life is good.

But having said that it’s been one hell of a week(end).

My grandmother, who has been a mostly faithful reader of this site for many years except recently when her recovery from knee-replacements has kept her away from her computer, recently came down with a rather nasty gut bug. So my father and I rushed across the state and spent a rather long time fighting with various medical red tape to get her admitted to the hospital and then to begin shepherd her through various thises and thats. The end result: she’s healing quite well, and doing pretty well.

For a while there she was the only patient conscious in the ICU but a few others have started to wake up. But at the moment of this writing I’m pretty sure she’s the only patient doing a crossword puzzle in the ICU. Truth be told, we’re mostly just waiting for a single room to open up on another floor (because of the gut bug, they have to keep her in semi-isolation, and I’ve spent a lot of time wearing gowns to keep everyone else safe).

So this has been an adventure. And it’s not over yet. But at least I have a good laptop and the wireless at the hospital is top notch. Oddly I haven’t been able to connect to IRC (I think the hospital is blocking 6667). Wierd.

The one thing that is the most striking is that I’ve been, since Saturday really tired. Yesterday I took a nap in the afternoon with my boots on and still slept a full night. I’m making a point of writiting at the hospital while I’m just hanging out rather than waiting till I go home at the end of the day. Lets hope this helps.

Onward and Upward!

Here’s another post in my NaNoWriMo series. This one is about working on new and old projects, project energy, and how projects “end.”

I’m not particularly of the mind that stories are ever really “done” as much as they are abandoned. I have an old writing friend who rewrites and re-imagines his stories every so often, and if you listen to him talk you’d think he’s spent the better part of the last decade revising the same couple of texts. While I haven’t read the latest iterations and am purely speculating here, I suspect that I’d call each of these iterations independent stories/projects. Because I like that kind of accounting. And we all tend toward the same basic characters and story structures anyway, besides it’s not like you can actually write a rip-off of yourself.

And the truth is, that’s more or less what I do. A lot. Station Keeping is a loose rip-off (adaptation?) of what would have been my second novel that I wrote about some tens of thousands of words on before and during my senior year of high school. The novel fell apart, I liked the story, but I didn’t have any way of rescuing it as such, and I was busy, and by the time I could get back into it, I needed to be working on a project more like Station Keeping and less like a lame high-school student’s second novel.

Knowing Mars has a similar history. Right before the home stretch of the first novel (see above) I took a week of writing time to put together a prologue. I took the “Matthew Connor” character (named, unsurprisingly “Matthew Connor,” why? because you can’t rip-off yourself) fast forwarded him fifty years or so, and had him as an old man relate the history of telepathy in his world. Sound familiar? Anyway, the story from that novel was dumb by that week of playing around reads the world like a series of novella length stories. I stole a lot more from that novel for Knowing Mars, and it manages to neither be an extension nor a retelling of the earlier story, but it’s still a rip-off.

Projects don’t disappear, and I don’t think that they end, so much as they go away for a while and with luck come back a little more wise and rich.

But projects do occasionally conclude. And projects like Station Keeping--because of it’s “season”-based structure--conclude more often than others. I’m taking a break to let the first three chapters of the new novel project sink in, and spending some time with other important projects like Trailing Edge and Station Keeping. It’s good to visit the “old friends,” and I think it’s important that stories--particularly semi-published ones--get to a point where it’s acceptable to abandon them.

It turns out, that Trailing Edge, which I thought was just a different perspective on a similar sort of universe to a story that I abandoned last spring, is really more like a prequel to that story, and I think there are parts that I wrote last spring that I’ll be able to drop in largely unaffected into the “new” story. In the end, while I think it’s been a fun trip and a good experiment for Critical Futures, I’ll probably hack it down to short story length, (it’s going to end up in the novelette range) and rewrite it so that I can (try to) sell it to the old media. Plans subject to change and the interference of reality, of course.

On the theme of “projects ending up somewhere you didn’t expect,” Station Keeping--after 16 “Episodes” (well 15, really) of normal “column like” stories, for the remaining eight episodes of the second season I’ll be writing in the form of a screen play. Because screen plays are fun to write, pretty easy to read, and because Station Keeping serves as a regular “break” from the larger stories that I post on Critical Futures having a screen play is an even better “break” format. I was planning on doing season 3 as a screenplay and I think it’ll be fun to just… start a little early.

That’s what I’ve been working on in terms of fiction recently. So there.

Onward and Upward!

ps. I think it’s interesting that by breaking my “don’t post about writing rule” in honor of NaNo, I’ve also taken to inadvertently breaking my “don’t post endlessly about your projects,” rule. In any case, I’m on it now.

Chris and I were talking about our Linux usage the other day, and we both came to the conclusion that for better or for worse our main production machines were Linux machines. He still has a Vista machine and I still have my MacBook, but our main desktop machines are Ubuntu boxes. I’ve been rolling over a few questions: around what it means for an operating system to be suitable for production, and what it means that Chris and I are both using Linux systems for our day-to-day heavy lifting. Then, in order:

Production

Given the nature of my work (both vocational and avocational), I use and rely on computers extensively. While I’ve done a lot of things to backup my computer in the last few months and days, I cannot abide by a system that won’t do what I need it to when I need it. While most computers are pretty reliable these days, the understanding that a computer is going to be there and ready with the programs and the data is as much a matter of trust as it is technical capability. Users need to be able to trust their production systems to keep their data, to run as expected, and to not fail them.

Another factor is user-comfort. While I’m not 100% comfortable with my new computer yet, I know that this is something that comes with time, as we use a system more, we all learn quicker ways of accomplishing common tasks, and it becomes easier to perform our most important computing tasks, and the “price” of converting a project from your mind/speech/analog source goes way down. That’s a good thing.

A lot of my own musing on this site about productivity and technical usage, could be classified as being about making systems and users more production ready. While I think hacking on technology is really interesting, and technological development is really important, at the same time doing things with technology, is always the more important thing.

Linux

Chris and I are pretty technical users, admittedly, but I think we also have a pretty low tolerance for stuff that just doesn’t work. Which says something really fundamental about the status of Linux in 2008. While there are rough spots, the applications are pretty much right where they need to be. For instance, even before I began to seriously consider getting a Linux desktop set up for my own purposes, the vast majority of the software that I use on OS X has very viable Linux ports. While the general usability of Linux-based systems have gotten much better in the last couple of years (thanks Ubuntu), the ecosystem is very vibrant, and that’s incredibly important.

Having said that I think we’re probably still a few years away from seeing an Ubuntu/Linux Mint that’s ready for the general public. There are a few things that need to happen before that, such as:

• Hardware makers need to continue to make and build computers with Linixes pre-installed. Ubuntu’s installer isn’t more painful than windows' or OS X’s, and convincing average users to switch for ideological reasons after they’ve just bought a new computer is difficult. Also, given hardware compatibility issues, having companies like Dell and HP make sure that there’s support in the OS for the hardware is a great service.
• The interface needs to get a lot better. This is “just wait and see” issue mostly, but I think GNOME needs work, and without a really good and fun UI, Linux is sunk.
• X11, the primary graphics/interaction layer for all (?) unix/unix-like operating system GUIs (other than OS X) needs some work. Dual monitor support is lackluster, support for laptop displays is tenuous, and while I don’t think we should throw all of X way, a lot of the UI problems are rooted in X’s limitations. Of all the parts of the UI in most Linux systems, X is the weakest link. While this is a pretty low level concern, making X better will make the whole experience better. And that’s what counts. I may be able to get really impressive system up-times, but unless I can get impressive up-times for X, the former isn’t worth much.
• End User distributions (Ubuntu, etc) and bare-bones distributions (Arch, Gentoo, etc.) need to become even more distinct. Ubuntu should probably attempt to use a more “rolling release” approach to package inclusion and should attempt to cover up command line access the same way that OS X does, say, and the bare-bones distributions should probably avoid delusions that they’re going to capture the end user market, and focus at being even more awesome bare bones distributions. The great thing about Linux distributions is that they don’t really compete with each other and while the geeks might know this, I’m not sure the general public does in the same way.

That’s what I have for now, do any of you have ideas about what more Linux needs before it’s production ready for the general use user?