When it comes to text editing, I got got by the Emacs bug practically from day one. The idea of an editor where practically everything was coded in macros, and could be changed in almost any way was very attractive. The Emacs I started with was a monster for the Vax 11/780 that the CS department had, and there often were complaints about the amount of resources it hogged, which in 1984 were considered to be quite exceptional.

As a consequence I never learned Vi. Often I regretted it, when remotely connected to some Unix or Linux system that didn’t have Emacs installed. A couple of weeks ago I read Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?. I sort of knew a reason why I should – it’s everywhere, unlike Emacs.

So, time to bite the bullet. I have installed gVim on my Windows working platform, MacVim on the Mac development platform and ViEmu into Visual Studio and have been forcing myself to learn as much as possible. It IS a steep learning curve indeed, but I was very, very surprised. Almost everything I use in Emacs on a day to day basis is in Vim, and quite a bit of it is quicker and easier to use than Emacs – it’s just that so much of the power is hidden from immediate view.

I’m glad I took the time to learn, as I think I’ll be sticking with it, and I know I’ll have a text editor waiting for me no matter which machine I use.

A generic term for a series of Microsoft operating systems. Windows has come to dominate the desktop. These days, I see Windows in two main contexts. One is a platform for development of commercial applications in a corporate setting, this world is fairly committed to Windows for a number of reasons which are fairly solid and unshakeable for now.

The other is home users. My exposure here is supporting friends and neighbours, and viewing this world I see Windows as more and more of a handicapped lumbering monstrosity that stops people from doing what they want by making things too complex and too unreliable. It is a spoilt, bastard child – “in your face”, either saying “look at me, I’m here” when you just want it to do it’s stuff, quietly and efficiently or it’s throwing a tantrum, stamping it’s feet saying “Nope, I won’t, nope, go away”, and then sulking in a corner refusing to help.

To this world, I am increasingly saying you don’t need the hassle, go get something that just does email, allows you to browse the web, can organise your photos and do some home video. Get a Mac. Games? Get a Wii (or maybe a PS3).

Wordpress is a top-notch blogging engine. It is very good, especially to get a site up and running quickly. My family all use Wordpress blogs, and I am unlikely to get them to change.

It is easy to theme, but is manifestly a blog engine. People bend it into a CMS on a regular basis, but it all looks like too much work for any sane person.

Drupal is a kick-ass CMS, which can be used in too many ways to mention.

I am using it here as a blog and a wiki.

Why is Drupal so good? Because it is clean, and flexible. The code is a dream to read, and once you get inside the head of the developers you can do anything. It is a developers CMS, not a users CMS. So, if you want a site built, give Drupal to a developer, get back your site that does what you want, and then run it yourself.

I also do freelance Drupal development (funny that).

I have migrated this site back to Drupal. Bye, bye WordPress.

I moved the Silver Lexus theme across first, which was a very interesting exercise, but also fairly straightforward, but time consuming. Drupals theming system is very flexible and can do most things quite easily. It is therefore surprising the general lack of quality themes available “off the shelf”. My only theory is the type of user. Drupal seems to target itself more at the professional user, who is more likely to pull together their own website appearance anyway.

Conversion of the posts was very straightforward (apart from accidentally sending Twitter 200+ updates of new blog postings – oops). Comments were a little trickier since the site has been moved a few times and the comment texts were a bit of a mashup of previous comment titles mixed with comment bodies. This part I dealt with by hand.

Widgets were more of a problem, a couple were available off the shelf. A couple, I wrote my own implementation of. A couple were simple copies of the Wordpress version. And the remaining few bit the dust.

Gallery integration was so easy that I wondered why I left it to last.

I changed back because I am now doing a fair bit of Drupal freelance work, and keeping my skills razor sharp seemed a good idea. I was dallying with Yaki a novel, clean, wiki based system, but felt that becoming hot at Python and another system would not be helpful to my current goals. Nice system though, and I am using Drupals freelinking module to add a wiki style flavour to the blog.

It appears that some Leopard upgraders are getting a taste of the infamous BSOD that Windows users have had the mickey ripped from them for ever.

Initial reports indicate that the main culprit is an application called “Application Enhancer”. Looking at it’s product page, it isn’t surprising at all that this program causes problems. It looks like a tool for hacking into low-level OS functions to change their behaviour so that other products in Unsanities portfolio, and other developers such as Logitech, can change underlying Mac OS behaviour.

Apple will be getting a lot of “it just works” NOT, comments for this, but how can an OS provider protect themselves from this sort of programs abuse. By nailing things down like the iPhone, I suppose, which nobody really wants.

So, it’s a consequence of having an open(ish) system, and a program that plays dirty. It would have been real nice if Unsanity had advised their users of the problem in advance.

My MacBook Pro is at the doctors getting a new bottom pan. So, while it is in I have decided to create a second account on Alisons MacBook.

It was amazingly easy to restore my backup made by iBackup onto Alisons computer. Within half an hour I had all my applications back, all my data back and everything working fine and dandy. I spent the next hour in a daze over how easy it was. Want to convert a seasoned Windows user to the Mac? Race him in restoring a computer.

Actually, nine hours later and I’m still in a daze. Sad, but true.

Oh, the applications weren’t just a li’l old word processor, etc, but an Apache/MySql/Php setup of Drupal, a Php development environment, along with everything else – mail, address books, bookmarks, documents, OmniFocus, iTunes, iPhoto, KeePass, blah, blah de blah. *EVERYTHING*.

A few weeks ago I started having problems with the super-drive on my MacBook Pro. Basically, it was scratching (or should I say, severely gouging) any media that I inserted. I thought it was the drive, and phoned Apple who quite quickly told me that it could be repaired and my local repair centre in Ipswich.

Cool. Until I rang them up. They said, if it is physical damage then I would have to pay for the repair. This prompted a close physical inspection, which revealed that the slot on the front of the drive was slightly closed up, and this was what was doing the damage. Careful examination showed that the aluminium case was slightly buckled. Shit. I have carefully looked after this laptop, and at no point has it taken an impact that could have done this, and yet there it was – a sodding dent.

The Ipswich firm (not Apple, but a repair agent) told me that it would cost well over £200 for this. So, I didn’t do anything.

A couple of months later I can’t take not being able to use the drive anymore, so I arranged a consultation with an Apple Genius at the Manchester Apple Store – hoping that I was wrong about the physical damage that couldn’t have occurred.

The guy was good, very good. It was a pleasure to deal with someone who understood the kit well and had very good customer service training. Unfortunately, in the end it was still deemed as physical damage. This is my only beef, how did it happen?? I still don’t understand how the damage could have occurred and I raised my concerns about robustness of the aluminium case. Apple are convinced that the aluminium case lends excellent protection, and the guy showed me examples of machines that had received severe bashings, but were still working.

Deep down, I think a plastic case might be more likely to break, but would be cheaper to replace and more likely to be able to take a knock and bounce back to the original shape, whereas I suspect that the aluminium case would deform permanently under the same conditions.

Anyway, the repair is booked while I am on holiday, which solves the issue of whether I take the laptop with me!

I have been using the sneaky peak preview releases for a few weeks now, and WOW. Although you can quite quickly feel the pre-beta status with certain types of glitches, the program has been stable enough (for me) to use to organise my work and home actions. I have also been diligently reporting any issues to the “support ninjas” who have been very helpful in their replies.

I know that I have found my GTD support software now, the rocky road of discovery has finally come to the end. Along the way, I have tried ThinkingRock, iGTD, GTDGMail (now GTDInbox), Tracks, NextAction and MLO. Quite a list. But, nothing else was in quite the same league.

The closest, and best second place was iGTD. iGTD does have the advantages of being free, available now, and being production quality (nowadays, anyway). The author used the “release quickly and frequently” approach, whereas Omni are trying to get an established and robust feature set together before the first public release. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but most established companies tend to go with Omni’s way. The bad thing about the “release when ready” approach is when a reasonably competent competitor is out there soaking up your potential customer – which I feel is happening with iGTD.

So how does OmniFocus beat iGTD in my world? I have been wrestling with this question for a couple of weeks, holding off writing this entry since there are few concrete points.

The main issue is the cleanliness of the user interface. OmniFocus is very free flowing, entering and editing data are not too dissimilar to just editing a text document with outdent and indent functionality. You don’t have to open a form to edit details, or double click fields to put them in edit mode, you can type in multiple tasks just by rattling them in and pressing enter after each line, simple, quick and intuitive.

A second point is that it uses a database to store the tasks, so the scalability and stability seems (to me) to be inherently more assured than an XML document that continually grows and needs writing out in its entirety every time anything is edited.

And another, critical point, is the handling of sub-projects. OmniFocus handles them much more intuitively where the next action with a project ripples down to sub-projects as they come up, so a project with sub-projects becomes a continuous task flow of its own. iGTD treats sub-projects as projects in their own right, so you can end up with multiple next-actions within one project.

A final point, though, is that with iGTD is releasing so frequently, any of these issues could have been dealt with in the last few weeks, and I may by woefully out of date – but I’m not going back – I’m happy where I am now.

All of my domains, the mud server and gallery are now hosted on a nice new shiny server in Denmark at EasySpeedy. I chose them because they were relatively cheap for an unlimited bandwidth, high speed backbone and a dedicated host. The old P3 server is hopefully in a skip somewhere in Leeds!

The migration seemed seamless apart from a minor glitch in email notifications, which meant some comments went unmoderated for a little while.

Thank you Dave (you know who you are) for my earlier hosting arrangements.