Haemorrhaging pens
So far I've lost my bullet Space Pen (probably in Mervyn's), my Pilot G-TEC C4 (no idea where that's gone), a couple of Sharpies, and miscellaneous “stationery cupboard ballpoints”. I'm very fortunate to still have my Vanishing Point!
This, of course, is justification (to a
stylophile, at least!) to purchase some
more pens… and ink, for that matter! Gift purchasers, take note — my love of shiny things extends beyond knives and watches; it encompasses
fountain pens, too.
I have my eye on some
Noodler's, and I'm in search of a pocket fountain to replace the bullet. Perhaps also a
broader nib for the Vanishing Point — I am feeling more expressive, despite being told that my handwriting with the narrow nib is beautiful, and the broader nib facilitates that — or yet another pen… we shall see.
Posted at 2005-09-17 21:59:58 by Richard • Link to Haemorrhaging pens
LibraryThing suggestions
I just started using ‘meta’ tags on
LibraryThing —
status:read, for example. I think this could be useful, and thus I propose the following as a starting point:
- status:read
- I've read it, cover-to-cover, or near enough.
- status:unread
- Should this be implicit? I haven't read it.
- status:reference
- I use the volume for reference; not necessarily to read cover-to-cover.
- status:reading
- I'm currently reading this book.
Some of these prompt further categorisations — “given up reading” might be useful! — but we can see what emerges. Anyway, those are the ones I've used so far.
Update: I'm also using
status:toread,
status:partiallyread. Oh, and I bought a membership. This could get addictive….
Posted at 2005-09-17 19:16:44 by Richard • Link to LibraryThing sugge…
Pause celebre
I am, as you are probably aware, a fan of the semicolon; it is a useful tool in the writer's toolbox. The FT has a
beautiful article in its defence:
Now, one may dispute the merits of Brideshead Revisited until the last classical facade crumbles and falls, but it would be capricious to deny Waugh's prose its allure. And this is the point, whether by sensuous cadence slow or karmically balanced meter, semicolons are weapons of mass seduction. Of course, they can be deployed meretriciously, but eye the well-thumbed passages of great British writing anew and you'll see them lolling around like mischievous putti, nudging us into nuance, winking ironically, taking us further — further than we might have ever thought we wanted to go.
(You will notice that I'm also a big fan of the em dash!)
This is the kind of writing I would like to produce — hopefully
do produce, on occasion! — languid and seductive. I'm sure I fall short, but the idea still inspires me.
“If I were linguistic emperor,” says Michael Tomasky, who recently took over as editor of the unabashedly liberal The American Prospect, “not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we'd all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I'm on some sort of drug. What writing today does that? Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas.”
Style, as F.L. Lucas observed through pages larded with semicolons, “is a means by which a human being gains contact with others; it is personality clothed in words, character embodied in speech.”
Go and
read it.
(Please note that, in light of my recent writing of 4 posts a day, I have bumped the articles-per-page count to 8.)
Posted at 2005-09-17 17:38:10 by Richard • Link to Pause celebre
Indeed
Yet even in certain defeat, the courageous Trager clung to the belief that life is not merely a series of meaningless accidents or coincidences. Uh-uh. But rather, it's a tapestry of events that culminate in an exquisite, sublime plan. Asked about the loss of his dear friend, Dean Kansky, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and executive editor of the New York Times, described Johnathan as a changed man in the last days of his life. “Things were clearer for him,” Kansky noted.
Heh. I wonder in which direction the plan points, mm?
I'm feeling well fed.
Posted at 2005-09-17 15:11:59 by Richard • Link to Indeed
My current development setup
The issue of which tools to use for Lisping comes up occasionally on
comp.lang.lisp, and more frequently on
#lisp. Invariably, the majority answer is a rallying cry of “emacs!”, but I'm a seasoned
Vim user, so I always gently
make the case for the defence.
I've
blogged about this before (wow! almost a year ago!), but my setup evolves, so it's time for another post. This is a massively egotistical post, then, but bear with me.
I do a lot of stuff in the Terminal. With Mac OS X 10.4, Apple's Terminal application is now vastly faster than iTerm, my previous favourite, and approaches
xterm — but it does transparency. A very recent change (yesterday) was to drop my font size right down, from Monaco 10 to Monaco 8, and rely on anti-aliasing. My iBook's 1024x768 display now shows 208x65 columns, which is more than enough to have two decent terminals open and still have room for an editor.
I've become quite a fan of Monaco, actually — even in Vim I've switched from Andale Mono, and I've also dropped the font size (though I'm less happy about it). Coupled with the
ps_color theme for Vim, I have a very ergonomic setup, but can see a lot of text at once.
I use Vim's window splits a lot, both to edit multiple files and to reference different parts of the same file, and I also use the
mini buffer explorer to see what I'm working on. Syntax highlighting,
VIlisp, sometimes
taglist, and custom
.vimrc settings round out my editing experience nicely.
VIlisp warrants a mention of its own. This ever-reliable plugin basically does two things: provides a conduit between Vim and any application, and lets you do things with s-expressions. The usual thing to do, then, is to launch a local Lisp executable, and evaluate code straight from Vim. However, you can also launch
ssh, resume a
screen session, and
pipe things to a running Lisp — all without actually having to set plugins up. I have used this, and it's useful.
The separation of Vim and the conduit is a feature, not a bug. If I end up in a terminal somewhere, looking up something in
less, I can quickly open it in a terminal Vim session… and VIlisp works through the same pipe. Multiplexing! Furthermore, I actually have a proper Terminal REPL, just in case.
What I am missing is some of the useful integration that a full-featured complex monster like SLIME offers. A debugger, integrated
describe, HyperSpec lookup, and so on. However, I find that Vim gives me at least the proverbial 80%; I don't do much debugging that a stack trace and my brain can't fix, and Quicksilver gives me HyperSpec lookups via Google (or I could fall back on
specbot…).
The other part of my workflow is
darcs. I keep a local repo for all of my code, and I have a remote repo on my development server.
ssh-agent gives me passwordless logons, so as I work I regularly run a little shell script to record my changes and push them out. I rarely have to actually restart my remote application, because I re-evaluate any changes as I'm making them — macro definition changes are the main reason for a reload.
In about 2 months I've checked in 286 revisions on my main codebase, which is about 7 per work day. (I wonder if this is atypical behaviour; I seem to use my RCS as a history, rather than just recording major changes.)
My screen layout, then, is as follows:
- Vim
- Terminal, connected to my remote Lisp
- Terminal, in my local source directory, mostly for darcs
- Colloquy, #lisp
- Colloquy, #swig
- Adium contact list
- Adium conversations
OmniWeb and Mail float over the top; everything else hides.
I feel productive!
Posted at 2005-09-17 14:23:07 by Richard • Link to My current develop…
