I am writing this in a text editor of my own making. I had
never thought about making a text editor until I had a problem
that writing a text editor could solve. I have been working on
the shell for my server a lot over the past week. It is getting
to be pretty solid. It proxys commands via the python sybprocess
module in combination with the shell keeping virtual track of
current working directory. This has served to be able to control
where a user can view and write to fairly elegantly. As such,
most of the basic commands a user would expect are present. A big
problem had been how I should allow users to create files. Using
Vim seemed like a good first choice. However, not everyone is as
comfortable in Vim as I am. Not only that, but there were a few
technical issues using Vim. Anyway, that is where "Chalk" comes
in. It is a line based text editor inspired by the editor at the
Red Consensus (which I very much like). I took the basic concept
for the visual look of it and added some control commands. The
control commands allow for rewriting lines, removing individual
lines or ranges of lines, displaying the whole contents, etc.
This post is my first larger bit of writing using it and I really
like the feel and the feature set.
Other recent changes to the shell include: ansi color, man
page style entries for all shell commands, updates to the chat
room that improve performance (still no scrolling through history
though).
Last time I updated my phlog I think I complained a little
bit about how reaching my server seemed to be unreliable. Well,
last nigh t I tried to sort that all out. In the process pretty
much everything broke. SSH access was lost and I had to pull out
a keybaord and HDMI cable to try and get it back to where it was.
As it turns out, while getting it "back to where it was" I added
a field to my /etc/network/interfaces file that I had neglected
to include the first time. It seems to have solved the issue! I
do not have much up on the site right now, and what is there
feels very derivative of both content and structure on many of
the servers popular with readers here. I hope to carve my own
niche soon and find an individual feel/voice (a lot of which will
hopefully come from the user shell I have been putting so much
work into).
----
In other news I had a really humbling/rough day at work
today. For those that don't know, I am a web developer by day. It
helps to keep the lights on. Anyway, I was assigned the final
bit of a project that everyone else on my team had touched a bit
except for me. Immediately there were merge conflicts trying to
get all of the code in one branch. The person that knew the most
about the branches being merged was out of the office. Once I got
all of that sorted out I came to realize that I just did not get
the code at all. I do not care for the very very OOP focused way
my boss tends to write code. I think OOP has its place, but his
code always feels overly engineered and needlessly complicated. I
think he would argue that it is more readable. Maybe so, but not
to me. After a long while staring at it & waiting for it to make
sense I started questioning my life choices and how I came to the
path that brought me to this project. I usually feel very capable
but this really had me low. My wife, who works on a different,
team in the same office (also a web developer) sensed the funk I
was collapsing into and gathered another couple that we like that
work there as well (a designer and another developer) and we all
went out to lunch and I got to vent for a bit. Once I got back I
realized I can make it work and make the tweaks I need and just
do it in small chunks. I got the first bit done and I think it is
both readable and functional. Hopefully the boss agrees when the
eventual pull request gets to him. They say as a programmer that
you will have moments where you feel like god shaping the earth &
times when you feel like the biggest idiot on it. Today was an
idiot day. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better one. Either way, I
am grateful for kind friends and family.
My wife is finally starting to feel better. As we get toward
the second trimester things seem to be calming down a bit. She is
no longer so nauseous. It has made her happier and I think she is
almost starting to enjoy things now.
----
I have been really wanting to reread the short fiction of Ted
Chiang. If you don't know his work I HIGHLY recommend checking it
out. "Story of Your Life" is fantastic, but all of his stuff is
among the best speculative/science fiction I have read. "The Life
Cycle of Software Objects" was also quite enjoyable. I have also
wanted to reread "Roadside Picnic" by Boris & Arakady Stugatsky.
It is a really fabulous work of soviet era science fiction. I
have not seen the movie, nor read the book, Annihilation... but
it seems to have borrowed liberally from Roadside Picnic.
