Thoughts

Markdown support in Posterous is trickier and more problematic than I had thought.

It’s possible that I’m misunderstanding how to go about it, but I’m seeing all sorts of problems with trying to get the formatting to actually do what I want it to.

However, I am not an expert user of Markdown at this point, so at this point it could just be my inexperience. I need to research more to really understand what’s going on and how Markdown is supposed to work.

I’m trying to track down an old article I read on stopping procrastination. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find it, so I’m just going to write down what I remember of it.

Basically the trick was to just go ahead and write out the description of the task that needs to be done, as dead simple as possible, so that someone that wasn’t all that smart could just follow the directions and get it done. Somehow, once that’s done, it’s pretty easy to just go ahead and follow those directions and get it done.

I find that almost always when I’m procrastinating on some kind of development task, it’s because there’s something I don’t understand or don’t know how to do. Forcing a description like this helps to smoke out those places where something isn’t clear to me and forces me to come to grips with understanding it.

I found what I think was the source of the above technique, it may have just been a comment on hacker news.

It’s too bad that so many of the thoughts that I think are interesting occur to me while driving, and by the time I can write them down I’ve forgotten them.

I know that I could try some kind of hands free recording. But something about speaking my ideas in their poorly defined form rather than writing them makes them sound stupid to me.

Somehow it’s all right to have a poorly defined thought in a quick scribbled note, but having to say it out loud in that form just sounds lame.

Things I can cook:

• hamburger steak
• hamburgers / cheeseburgers
• sausage and apples and cabbage
• sausage and onions and peppers
• french toast
• eggs scrambled or fried
• omelets
• rosemary chicken
• bachelor stew (similar to gumbo?)
• ground meat with peppers
• grilled cheese sandwiches
• stir fry
• borscht
• steak

Things I can make:

• salads
• sandwiches
• finger foods

Think I found a way to combine Emacs and Evil mode to get the kind of vi keybindings I want. That is, I only want vi keybindings when I want them. I want to have to activate them in a buffer and I don’t want them to take over all of emacs. And I only want them to apply to the buffer where I activate them.

At least that’s how I’m feeling about vi/emacs integration today.

SQL | SQLServer

Today I am trying to understand SQLServer well enough to script installation of new users without having admin access.

Here’s the gist of what is needed to add a new admin user:

1. Stop all SQL Server related processes.

2. Kill every possible connecting process.

3. Start SQL server in single user mode:

   sqlservr -f -m -s

4. Create new user:

   sqlcmd -S -E

   1> EXEC sp_addlogin ‘user’, ‘password’
   2> GO
   1> EXEC sp_addsrvrolemember ‘user’, ‘sysadmin’
   2> GO
   1> EXIT

This can be run from a script as

sqlcmd -f -m -i/path/to/script

5. Ctrl-C SQL Server to stop it.
6. Restart SQL Server service.

Just figured out that my blog isn’t viewable on the text based browser I’m using.

For some reason w3m (the browser I’ve been using) doesn’t show the slugs as links to the actual posts.

Looks like it works ok in lynx from the command line (but not lynx in an emacs ansi-term buffer) and in elinks both via command line and in emacs.

Thoughts

I’m going to try to see what it’s like to just collect my random thoughts and snippets here throughout the day, and then maybe edit them at the end of the day.

It turns out that when you sneeze with a mouth full of oatmeal, it’s almost indistinguishable from real snot.

I’ve spent a large part of today playing with installing the Solarized color theme for vim and emacs on my work computer.

I like the way it looks, but I’m wary of using or installing a lot of non-default things these days. I wonder how much time I spend tweaking things when if I just accepted the defaults I could get on with work.

On the other hand, maybe this is a form of play for me, and maybe it at least keeps me in a kind of readiness for doing real things later.

I’m wondering if I would get more done if I would keep all these other text based applications (for things like web browsing, chat, etc) out of Emacs and just use graphical apps and then use Vim for my text editor.

That way it would maybe be easier to know when I’m wasting time.

Maybe I could use the rescue time website / application to track my time. Of course Emacs probably has a way to do that if my apps are running in Emacs buffers.

I spent a bit of time taking things out of Emacs. But then I added the Solarized color theme to gnome-terminal, and decided that I liked the way it looked to have Emacs running in the terminal enough to try adding stuff in Emacs again.

I’m thinking about trying to send this as a Posterous post, but I need to refresh my memory on how to do Markdown for it, otherwise sending a plain text email, will cause all the text to run together (I think).

I don’t really know what I’ve gained from my efforts today. I’ve done a fair amount of work to explore using the Solarized color them under Ubuntu and so far I like it. I’ve got it installed for Emacs and Vim as well as the Gnome-Terminal app.

I really would like to figure out a real way to be productive when I’m not interested in the things I’m trying do (or supposed to be doing).

I think having a lot of apps running directly in Emacs seems dangerous because it makes it hard to tell when I’m actually working or not.

On the other hand having everything in separate apps, makes things feel clunky and somehow boring to me. I want to live in a text based computing world. I just don’t know how to get anything done while using it.

One thing I notice though is that wasting time viewing text based apps running in Emacs does not lead to the brain dead feeling that surfing the internet excessively in a normal browser gives me. I think that’s a positive, at least it seems like it leaves me in a state where I could work if I decided to.

posting from command line

This is a quick test of how well posting from a command line email client works.

How Writing Teaches Me

I realize that I learn what I think by writing. I actually teach myself by writing. That is really the truth of it. I teach myself by writing. I learn things I didn’t know before by writing. I have at least two new opinions today that I didn’t have yesterday because I wrote yesterday. I realized things about God that I hadn’t realized before because I wrote yesterday.

It’s not just that writing makes me think. It’s that it makes me think in ways that I never would have if I didn’t write. Writing causes me to explore directions I would never have the discipline to explore in my meandering daily thoughts. Instead writing leads me to solid insights that can help me and others. With the Lord’s guidance it can lead to understanding that can change peoples lives.

Search Me And Know Me

My God, Heavenly Father, and my Lord Jesus Christ. I hope that You are blessed by Your work in my life. You have taken me out of so much, and have revealed so much that is in my heart that needs to be different. I am glad for Your searching.

"Search me and know me Lord, and see if there be any wicked way in me."

Lord you have done this. And I know you have found much that needs cleansing and repentance and turning from.

O Lord, thank you that You don’t let us stay with ourselves. Thank you that you reveal things to us and convict us. Thank you that you design circumstances to bring out the evil that is in us, so that we have opportunity to repent rather than continuing to hide things in our hearts that are unlike you. There is no one else like you that seeks truth so that mercy may be shown. You are a good God and full of grace.

My Coding Environment

Table

It let’s me look at my code from different angles. And it keeps working when I spill coffee on it.

Multiple Monitors

Ok, this is actually pretty sweet. Linux on the left, Windows on the right. This is where I actually try to convince computers to do what I want.

Who Cares About Code

There is a statement that code is written for humans primarily and only incidentally for computers. Is this statement true? It is true that computers don’t actually care what computer language you write in – all that the computer sees are ones and zeros that the code gets translated to.

So what this statement is actually saying is that code serves as a communication medium that is friendlier to human understanding than the native ones and zeros that the computer understands.

The question is, how well does most code work for communicating to other humans? Ultimately, the only other humans who are going to care about the form of the code itself are other programmers. Everyone else will only be concerned with whether it does what it is supposed to do with an acceptable experience. The code may impact that experience if it is poorly written, but no actual user is going to care about the clever tricks or elegance of the code. They will only care about the design and performance of the experience. So, code really serves as a description of the interaction that someone will have with a computer. But it is a bit like a playwright that is only really writing for other playwrights to read, and who is only writing the play for one half of the actors to perform while the other actors do improv.

Testing Mobile Posting

Had some problems with the previous post showing up on mobiles. Seeing if another post has the same problem.

Another Test

Here is another test from a slightly different way of posting.

1st Blackberry Post

I’m writing this little post to see how easy it is to write a blog post from my Blackberry.

Pocket Typewriter

I wish that I had a good pocket sized way to transcribe my writing into a form that is viable for putting on the web. I feel like I did have that with my previous phones, but I don’t really now. It’s unfortunate because it makes me feel like writing on paper is therefore probably causing a fair amount of my writing to not make it beyond paper simply because of the extra work involved and therefore my tendency to let it drop.

I think that the iphone has a keyboard that I could type on while looking at something else, even though it is an onscreen keyboard. I feel like my old droid, even though the keyboard was slow, at least it did allow me to type successfully. Of course my Palm Veer was the best, but I no longer have that phone nor any certainty of of having one again. Unfortunately I don’t really know of a great option at this point. I’m not even sure that I know of a good option.

New Phone Sad Day

I’ve gotten a new phone to replace my Palm Veer now that HP has killed support for WebOS devices.

However I don’t know how much I will be using it to post to Posterous. I loved the keyboard on the Veer. I would not at all minded doing reasonable length posts using the Veer. However, in contrast, on this phone (a fairly genetic lower end Android phone) while I find the Swype keyboard technically interesting, I find it easily annoying in practice. As a result, I’m not sure I can imagine doing really long posts using this current phone. I am considering getting an iPhone when the new version comes out. I believe that it would be more conducive to longer writing.

For now this is what I’ve got. I’ll try to make the best of it. Hopefully I can still doing some shorter posting even if I can’t match the length of what I might be able to do with another phone.