Category: projects (Page 18 of 25)

Here’s a script I use to test the validy of a .yml (YAML) file.

I’ve suffered with the native Mac OS X Terminal app for over five (six?) years now. I much prefer the Konsole terminal in KDE on Linux, or even the Gnome terminal. They have tabbed terms, which helps considerably when I have dozens of terms open. The OS X Terminal app has always been adequate, but never Really Good.

Over the years I’ve tried all the alternatives: GLterm, iTerm, and all the Java options. iTerm came closest to what I wanted but was too slow on my old 1Ghz G4 powerbook.

But now — now! — I have a new Intel MacBook Pro. I am happy to say that iTerm is Perfect! Or at least, so much better than Terminal that I am just giddy.

Geek thrills.

Update 26 Sept 2007:

iTerm is a memory hog. All those tabbed sessions started gobbling ram.

But all is not lost. I discovered that KDE is now native on OS X 10.4. So now I can use konsole on Linux and OS X. It has a nice split screen feature and more customizations than Terminal or iTerm. But it does not let me use many of the same native Mac keyboard shortcuts. Copy/paste (for example) are cmd-shift-c/cmd-shift-v, which is awkward to remember. And the convenient highlight/middle-click shortcut does not appear to work either. Too bad.

Why can’t I have my terminal AND code too?

More update:

Looks like OS 10.5 (Leopard) will have Terminal 2.0 with tabs. It remains to be seen whether I’ll shell out the $$ for the OS just for that. I might.

use.perl linked to this interesting metric regarding dynamic language job ads.

I get ideas.

Usually these are software projects I would like to write, either because I couldn’t find one that does what I want or because I am just curious about how hard it would be to write one.

Examples:

personal mail full text search

Like Gmail but for your local desktop email client. Maybe this is a moot idea now and something already exists since I haven’t looked in awhile, but I’d like a server-side email search that works with mbox or maildir formats, that I could run as a daemon (or whatever) that would give me real-time full text search of my email. I host my own IMAP server, and the full text search my client sw gives me is slow since it must search all mail in the raw, rather than a fast index.

Rose::DB::Object caching base class

I use Rose::DB::Object Perl ORM for a lot of projects and have written some caching code but it would be nice to have a CPAN-available base class that does that caching for me.

I know I’ve had other ideas — my problem is I never write them down. So this will be my new place to record them.

It is a strange comfort to know, when working alone late at night on computer projects, that there are other people I know, in far away geographies, also at work at this very moment. And that they know that I know.