Banal Minutiae

Here’s a test post. I’ve made a lot of changes to my setup. I’m now on an Acer Aspire One, using both XP and Ubuntu Linux. Right now, I’m testing Windows Live Writer rather than the WordPress Dashboard.

Just playing around, really.

I thought I’d give a quick update of my experience with Bloglines. As I said yesterday, I need to move away from an offline reader, and migrate to an online solution. I’ve found two, Bloglines and Newsgator. I talked about Newsgator yesterday, and some of it’s limitations. I forgot to mention one of it’s strengths: if you have Feedburner, their offline reader tool, you can synchronize your feeds across multiple computers. Nice.

However, as I said, the limitation of 40 new articles is pretty crippling. I’m not sure If there is a workaround or not, but I haven’t found one yet.

That said, I decided to evaluated Bloglines, which is a similar aggregator service, with the slight difference that offer a blog host as well as two different features: clippings and playlists. I’m not going to talk about the clippings and playlists features, since I haven’t used either one yet. Perhaps later.

The blog feature is a basic blog, doesn’t seem like anything special, no templates, etc… Since I use WordPress, I’m not really interested.

What I’m really interested in is the RSS aggregator feature. This works great. It doesn’t seem to have any of the limitations that plague Newsgator. I think we may have a winner. Right now, I don’t have any negatives.

I’ll do an update later with more details.

Okay, start of a new year. Like so many others out there, I made a few New Year’s resolutions.
First, since our IT department has gone hardcore, and limited software on our machines to company installed only (a rant for another time), I was forced to eliminate by beloved GreatNews. This has forced me to move to a web based solution for getting my RSS fix for the day.

I’ve found two possible candidates that meet the bill for a fix. They are Bloglines and Newsgator.

I started with Newsgator about a week ago, and thought I’d give you a summary of my week’s experiences as a sort of mini-review.

Newsgator looks good. Let’s get that out of the way. I only found a single feed that didn’t work correctly (The Superficial). For some reason, images on that feed appear as html links to the real images. Strange since they work correctly in GreatNews.

The layout for reading is decent, as is performance. I’m pretty happy overall with the way it handles everything, with a single, mind numbingly painful exception. This is a deal ender, folks. That limitation is the inability to have more than 40 new messages in a feed. Also, there appears to be a limitation with the exact age of a message. For example, it appears to me you can’t go back over 2 weeks. Messages you haven’t read are simply ignored/deleted.

Of course, this could possibly be my stupidity. There might very well be an option to fix this, but my brief search wasn’t able to find a fix. This is a killer for high volume feeds like del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, etc…

This week I’ve started on Bloglines, a similar service, which has the distinct difference in that it allows more unread messages per feed, and doesn’t seem to have the same limitations that Newsgator has. However, you’ll have to wait a while for a full update.

I’m writing this in darkroom, a different kind of text editor. Basically, it exists in a completely different paradigm from other word processors. It’s purpose is to remove all the clutter from the screen and reduce the editing window to a simple blinking cursor.

This harkens back (for me, at least) to the days of old Unix text editors like Vi. If you’re a long time DOS user, it will remind you of Word Perfect 5.1, although, truthfully, darkroom is nothing like them.

That’s because darkroom is totally bare bones. It’s a text editor with search and replace. That’s it. There’s no fancy formatting, page setup, codes, mail merge, etc… Nothing like that. There’s no spell checker. No thesaurus. No fancy grammer checker. It exists in an almost Zen like total vacuum of features. The only keys that actually word are the standard Windows editing keys.

The major upshot of all this is the focus this forces you to bring to your work. There’s no distractions like figuring out the perfect font,  or how to add graphics or other frills to your document. This is a writer’s tool. Basically, just type out whatever you’re working in, save it to a file, and import it into whatever word processor you’re going to use to print it out.

I’ve been using it now for a little while, and I’ve started to really like it. The black background with neon green text reminds me of my heady Tandy days. The only changes I’ve made to the default settings are to change the default screen font from COurier New to Consolas, and the default size from 10 point to 16 point. The larger text size allows me to sit back and stare at the monitor without having to squint at the text.

After using this tiny (123k) program for a week, I’ve noticed that I write more. I really think the author is onto something here. Darkroom runs fullscreen by default, which eliminates all the desktop distractions that frequently plague members of the Ritalin generation.

Back when I was in graduate school, I wrote my thesis using LaTeX, which is a macro system running on top of TeX, which was originally a document preparation system. TeX works with pure text files, with all formatting denoted by braces, and backslash characters. It does particullarly well with equations, which is one of the reasons I think scientists embraced it for journal articles. Also, the fact that documents were text files meant that they could be emailed back and forth for editing and such. TeX was also an early pioneer in a platform independent format. If you were running on a VMS box, you could email your latest paper to someone running on an SGI box, and they would be able to view or print your paper exactly like you would.

Very cool.

Anyway, this little trip down memory lane made me think of the perfect writing setup. Right (write?) now, I’m writing a paper using this darkroom/LaTeX combination, and I think it might be the ultimate.

For me, at least, it forces my mindset to go to a very old school process for writing: write, then edit. You literally write whatever you want, then spell check/proof read it when you’re done. This proofreading phase also helps force a more critical eye on your work, leading to what I believe is better writing, and that’s what it’s all about.

Think about writing in Word. You’re typing along, trying to complete a thought, when out of the corner of your eye, a red squiggle under a word. A typo. Damn. Better go back and fix that. Later on, a green squiggle under a sentence. Bad grammer. Better rewrite that sucker. It’s easy to lose your train of thought, and start focus on mechanics rather than substance. I’m not even going to mention the fact that the dreaded Outlook blinking envelope to remind you of new email can distract you as well.

With darkroom, there’s none of this. It’s simply write as much as you can, then edit it later. Much nicer.

In my head, I like to put on my Akubra Federation Deluxe fedora, and pretend I’m a hard boiled 1940s copy editor when I’m editing, but you can just sit back and enjoy reading your own work, which is a very different feeling from editing it on the fly.

Why not try it? You might like it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here, so I thought I’d change that with a nics discourse on my current pen of choice, the Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto.

For a while now, I’ve been using a Hero 329, a chinese copy of the venerable Parker 51 fountain pen. I’ve come to love the 329 (not as much as my Hero 100, though), especially since I smoothed the tip, but the fiddly nature of a fountain pen keeps pushing me back to the convenience of a more traditional ball point.

My affair with fountain pens has definitely been of the “love/hate” variety. I love the smoothness, the color and varieties of ink, and the nostaliga of the whole thing, but the width of the tip and potential ink problems (don’t drop this pen!) keep it from total perfection.

The Coleto is a nice multi-pen, although it only sports two different cartridges. The nice thing about it though, is that you choose the cartdridges, and there are literally a ton available. You can go with my combination of blue-black and red ink for example, or vary the tip thicknesses. I prefer a slightly thicker red line, for ease of reading corrections. Easy with the Coleto.

Another long gap in between posts.

Well, I’ve been busy outside. I’ve now got most of the major plant work done on my yard. All that remains is laying my walkway on the side of my house, and whatever I decide to do with the stump area off my deck. I’ve got the trees handled, though.

Life is good right now.

Let’s talk a little bit today about fonts. Specifically, I want to talk about programmer’s fonts. Like a lot of full time programmers, I fall into that group that is always looking to for the best editor and best font. Recently, I saw this website pop up on Digg, and decided I’d weigh in with my two cents.

For years, I’ve been a fan of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for my main programming font. I don’t remember where I originally stumbled upon it, but I think it was probably an old AxeMe thread. It’s served me well, and I’ve been happy with it. It was a giant step up from the Courier New (shudder), or even Lucida Console.

About a year ago, I decided I’d complicate my life, and discovered Anonymous, another brilliant monospaced font. I’m torn between the two, and switch back and forth between them.

In general, I was well satisfied. I’ve got an editor that supports my custom language with color coded syntax, does code folding, and even italicies my comments. I’ve also got a couple of nice, easy to read monospace fonts. But, like all good things, I had a wrench thrown into my happy space. I was reading up on Vista, Microsoft’s new operating system, and it’s sweet Aero Glass visual style. One of the things mentioned was the new fonts, along with a link to a blog article detailing them. I clicked through, and ruined my happiness.

You see there were all the new Vista fonts, Consolas, Calibri, Candara, etc… in a single, tiny zip file to download. After glancing at the images of each one, I decided I needed to try them. In general, I keep my font list small (under a hundred total fonts), and if a font isn’t very useable, it’s gone. Well, these new fonts are most excellent. I’m particularly taken with two of them: Consolas and Calibri.

Calibri is a replacement for Verdana, a font I had been using as my main Windows XP font since I first discovered it. Calibri is slightly more pleasing to my eye, and very readable. I made it my default font on the spot.

Consolas is quite possibly the best monospaced font I have ever used, narrowly edging out both Anonymous and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, both of which are excellent fonts in their own right.

I have no idea why I prefer it, I just do.

Look’s like a beautiful day here today. Enjoy!

I’ve just finished a book called “History of the Pencil”, by Henry Petroski. Here’s an Amazon linky here.

It’s certainly better than his previous book “Everyday Things”, which is BORING! Anyway, this is obsessive compulsive information for those of us who are curious about everything. Why are pencils yellow? Why are they made from cedar? If you have the type of personality that asks questions like these, this book would interest you.

I mention this, because I’m currently looking for a book on pens. I’ve always had a love for writing instruments, and after reading this fascinating work on pencils, I wodered if there was a similar work on pens. I write with a Parker 51 fountain pen clone that I love, but most fountain pens died overnight as a result of the ball point pen gaining wide spread use. I’d like to see a definitive history on this subject. After all, there’s some serious technology in a pen.

I’ve also given some thought to paper. Why is it that ink bleeds heavily on certain papers, but not others? What’s different? Why do certain papers feel so much smoother than others?

Anyway, just some thoughts.

I took Friday off last week to get a good start on a large amount of yard work I needed to get done. I figured it was supposed to rain Saturday and Sunday, so I might as well get it done Friday.

Friday turned out to be a beautiful day, and I managed to get a lot done. Somehow, I managed to get all the usual Friday errands (grocery, Wal-Mart, gas) done, plus I went to Lowe’s to pick up some compost for the garden.  I also managed to get my laundry done. Not bad for wanting to get yard work done.

I managed to get my garden weeded and worked some new compost into the soil, plus I managed to get everything planted. Let’s hope this year is a bumper crop like two years ago. I managed to get sun burned pretty good Friday.

Saturday was dismal and cooler, but I did manage to get the jungle mowed, as well as pruning a tree in my front yard. Had some people over for dinner, and made a couple of T bones on the grill. Nice.

Sunday was rainy, and I didn’t really do a whole lot.

All in all, a pretty good weekend. I just hate being back here at work.

Look, I’m sure you all know that Firefox is the web browser of choice, right?

It’s not due to the security holes in IE, or the interface. It’s a single, simpler point that makes firefox better: extensions. I saw this site this morning, and got to thinking about how many extensions I use.

What are extensions, you’re probably wondering (at least if you don’t use Firefox)? In a nutshell, they’re simple little add-in programs that change the way the browser behaves. This is a lot more powerful than you might at first think. While some extensions are simple, such as Session Manager, which remembers all your open tabs if you close the browser, some, like Tab Mix Plus for example, change the way elements of the browser work and appear (tabs, in this case). Still others are stand alone programs, like Performancing (a Blogging tool), or Sage (an RSS reader).

My favorite extension by a mile is Adblock. Basically, install it, and the Adlock Filterset.G Updater, and all those pesky text ads are going to vanish. Amazing. You’ll look at Yahoo! and similar sites in a brand new light, I promise you.

There is one other category of extension that I must mention, because it’s a close one whether or not this category is as good as adblock. That category is extensions that modify pages on the fly. There are basically three extensions you need: Greasemonkey, Stylish, and Platypus. Greasemonkey will run specific scripts on any given webpage. Stylish lets you change the style (CSS-wise) of anything. And Platypus lets you actually do a WYSISYG re-arranging and alteration of any page. All of these are simply amazing. Once you start using them, you’ll wonder how you lived without them.