Month: November 2007

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the write tools for every job

In this old post (back in 2004) I ranted about how I wanted a program for writing that took over the whole computer screen… no menus or anything. And now today I saw a guy here at work using iTerm in full screen mode. This was basically EXACTLY what I’d been looking for back in the day.

Now, I’ve been resisting the switch to iTerm, mostly because I usually “work” on a linux box, and only end up using my laptop for programming on trips or when I’m working in Flash (on my puzzle games). Anyway, Terminal has been “good enough” for my purposes thus far.

But suddenly (for a little more than the last week) I’ve been working on a (completely asinine) front-end project (ie, javascript), where I need to keep my PC booted into windows for IE testing. I’ve also recently upgraded to 10.5, and I’ve been enjoying the tabs in the new Terminal. At first, this was just another reason Terminal was “good enough” for my purposes, but now I’m upgrading to iTerm RIGHT NOW.

So then, after raving about how great this was, and how I’ve been wanting to do that for AGES, my co-workers point out there is another writing-specific application for mac that has the full-screen idea as its basic premise. It’s called WriteRoom, and looks pretty cool to me. I’m guessing that I’ll stick to vim and iTerm, but I might download it and give it a try sometime anyway. It’s got a nice price tag, if I did decide to buy.

This makes me wish (yet again) that I were doing nanowrimo this year.

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new twitter philosophy

new twitter philosophy: If I don’t think something is blog-post-worthy, then I’m not going to tweet it. This is partially (ok, pretty much wholly) because it will now show up here.

I’m still working on fixing twitter-tools, to get all my tweets into a Twitter category, but I made this post initially in twitter (via IM!), and it did indeed show up here on my blog. (Not right away, but not terribly long after either. I do wonder wherein lies the delay…) Anyway, the only thing that I was a bit unhappy about was that my initial Tweet was too long, and it got ellipses-ized. (I would rather Twitter just tell me the tweet is too long, so I can re-write it a bit shorter.)

I also wish there was some way to indicate to twitter-tools where the title of the post should end and the post should begin… maybe a line break? I haven’t experimented with this yet, but I’ll bet I could do a bit of custom hacking to allow me to use whatever delimiter I wanted.

UPDATE: I have now hacked my copy of twitter-tools.php to use “:” to indicate the end of a title for creating blog posts, and also to not make blog posts at all out of tweets that begin with the “@” character. I’m really enjoying this plugin hacking, and I may just have to write my own, if I can think of a project that sounds interesting enough.

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back to readable…

OK, I think I’ve got the layout here more or less back to readable. I’ll probably be making tweaks to the stylesheet indefinitely, but for now at least I’m happy enough with the colors to not feel totally disgusted. Astute WP geeks will notice that I installed K2, and also Twitter-tools, which doesn’t play terribly well with WP 2.3, but it’s good enough for now. I didn’t expect it to create entries for all my old tweets, but I guess I can live with that… (I may delete a bunch of them when I get around to it.)

Mike and Jason and Florence and I all went to The Source this afternoon. Florence and I picked up the first two issues of Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Stories, which I think is a comic re-telling of his “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth“. (I haven’t read them yet.) We also picked up the new Buffy (Florence is a huge fan), and a new Luna Brothers comic called “Sword”, (issue 1), and the new Groo comic. Of these, I’ve only read the Groo so far. (One of my guilty pleasures.)

We’re planning on seeing the 4:45 showing of Wristcutters: A Love Story at the lagoon.