For some time I’ve relegated bs-show to the longer binding and now use Stephen Bach’s excellent Lusty Explorer which works really well when you know the name of the buffer and it’s fairly unique. However when you’ve been going a while it can get un-manageable with a large number of open buffers, especially if you’ve opened second copy of a file from another source tree. This is what I would use the old classic bs-show for.

A few days ago I discovered ibuffer-mode with it’s ibuffer-bs-show buffer navigator. Looking back through the Planet Emacsen history I can see it has been mentioned before and given it’s been in Emacs since version 22 I’m surprised I hadn’t cottoned on to it earlier.

One thing that might have put me off is the initial buffer list can be quite sparse. By default you only see buffers with files associated which misses out IRC, Edit with Emacs and *scratch* buffers. However hit “h” and you’ll see there are a plethora of quick keys for chaning the view. A quick “//” and all filters are removed and you can quickly filter by different criteria. To get the most out of the mode you’ll probably want to set up some custom filters (“/r<completing filter name”>) to make quickly switching to groups of buffers easy. I currently have “work”, “remote”, “irc” and “logs” as filters. You can filter by name as well as major-mode.

ibuffer-mode does have the concept of Filter Groups although I’m not sure what they add on top of having normal filters which as far as I can tell can be arbitrarily complex. It also has some quite handy sorting and selection modes e.g. “sv” – sort by last viewing time. Given the amount of space the wiki devotes to the topic I wish I’d re-examined my buffer switching habits sooner. The change is already paying dividends for my productivity.

Before I go I thought I’d put in a quick mention of Google+. There is growing community of fellow Emacs users starting to post on it. One thing that attracts me to Google+ over Facebook (too data-miney) and Twitter (too short) is the concept of “Circles”. It makes sharing geeky Emacs posts with people that might actually care easy while sparing them the flood of baby pictures I share with friends and family. If you’d like to follow me or my alter-ego please do mention Emacs in your profile or in a message so I can assign you to the correct circles.

Previously I had two sets of org notes. My personal set where sitting on my server which I could access via the terminal. I generally accessed this at home on the odd occasion when I was doing things like the annual round of insurance quote gathering. The second set was a fairly simple time sheet type affair that I was using at work to keep a vague track of where all my time was spent. The big missing part of this is when I’m on the move.

I’ve just recently upgraded my phone to the latest Galaxy Nexus which is a fine Google enabled device. I make no apologies for using Google’s calendering and shared document services. They work very well and importantly allow me to share things with my wife who doesn’t quite share my desire to run everything from a text editor. However for my personal task lists on the move and remembering what’s coming up at work it doesn’t quite cut it. Besides I like org-mode and I’d heard about MobileOrg so I endeavoured to set it up.

MobileOrg has been around some time for the iPhone but the mechanisms it uses for integrating with org-mode are fairly well documented. As a result there is a couple of Android implementations for it. Matthew Jone’s mobileorg-android was the first version I tried.

The original sync method for MobileOrg was to use a service like Dropbox to sync files. Given the history of Dropbox’s security I wasn’t about to move my files into the proprietary cloud. The alternative is to enable WebDAV on my web-server and therefor enable two way communication via HTTP. It was a little concerning to see self-signed SSL wasn’t supported as this does open up a potential attack vector on my machine. I’ve mitigated it a little by using digest authentication instead of basic-auth but I’d still prefer to be conducting these read-write operations over something more secure.

Initial results were a little underwhelming. After some messing around with the format of org-links I eventually got a basic outline summary up. Unfortunately I can’t seem to sync notes created on my phone to the server. This seems to be a Apache problem which I shall have to dig into later.

After perusing the market some more I noticed there is a new project in town. Konstantin’s MobileOrgNG was forked some time ago from Matthew’s code and on installing I found it looked an awful lot better. I’ve still be unable to post any locally added notes (due to previously mentioned Apache config issues). However it’s presentation is a lot slicker and it shows a lot of potential for being a good MobileOrg client.

I’m now stuck with a classic open source fork dilemma. The code bases look to have diverged enough that these two projects are essential going their own way. Looking at the two impact graphs it looks like they diverged around August 2011 and since then MobileOrgNG looks pretty much like a solo effort albeit with an impressive commit rate of new features.

So the questions for my readers. Which code base should I jump on? Has anyone got experience with the two different code bases and the reason they split? Are there any other Android clients for org-mode I should be looking at?

After Christmas I indulged myself with a new phone. When I got the HTC Hero I’d deliberately skipped the first generation of Android phones to give a chance for the hardware to mature. I also made the rash promise it would be my last phone for some time. As it happens I think 2.5 years is a fairly good innings for a piece of technology where the innovation cycle is measured in months. I still have the Hero but now it’s not my main phone I can afford to be a bit more experimental with the software I put on it.

There were a couple of changes to my approach to choosing a new phone this cycle. The first was I brought it outright off-contract. Although I suspect I could get it slightly cheaper overall through a phone contract there are some non-financial downsides to the contract approach. The first is the operator takes the view that the phone belongs to them so they can install (and prevent you removing) what they like. The recent Carrier IQ controversy should certainly act as a salient reminder that the mobile phone companies do not have your interests closest to their hearts. The second is lack of flexibility. Although thanks to Ofcom we have number portability most people are only able to take advantage of it at contract break points. The operators know this and off course do their very best to keep you tied in to their deals. Now I’m off contract I’m currently paying £10/month for unlimited data and all the calls/texts I use. They have to work doubly hard to keep me as a customer as I can jump ship at any point. That flexibility is more than worth the up-front cost of paying for the phone in full.

As far as choice there was only really one in the frame. Much as I like Android and it’s open-source nature it does suffer from a problem due to that openness. Although it’s heartening to see manufacturers are starting to relent and cease the practice of locking boot-loaders to prevent 3rd party firmware there are still problems in their support. They tend to stop updating the firmware shortly after they stop manufacturing the phone. Some manufacturers also have a hard time meeting their GPL obligations which makes open source support for the hardware a lot harder. As a result I decided to wait for the next in the Google Nexus series which ships with the latest release of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.

Initial impressions of the new phone are good. The phone is a little bigger than the Hero but pretty much 100% screen with more than a few hints of Star Trek data pad . The Super AMOLED display looks very clear and crisp with both photos and video. The phone is very nippy thanks to the accelerated 3D hardware and duel core processor. The camera is certainly an improvement on the Hero and with the LED flash is close to achieving the quality I was used to on my old Sony K750. The A-GPS also acquires location a lot faster than the Hero. In fact a lot of things I thought were app problems have cleared up when presented with faster hardware. All in all I’m very happy with the Galaxy Nexus and think it easily stacks up against any iPhone you might want to compare it with.

A big cosmetic change is a brand new settings page which looks less like a web-form from the early 90′s and more like part of Chrome. Alas I can take no credit for this but can thank Frank Kohlhepp’s fancy-settings library. In fact a lot of the credit should go to third party libraries like jQuery and of course the growing list of contributors who have submitted code for merging.

So the final changelog for 1.10 is:

Extension

* Ignore textareas marked as read only
* Don’t tag areas that are not visible
* General clean-up to use jQuery to find elements
* Explicit CSS for edit button to override page settings
* Handle editable DIV blocks (e.g. Google+)
* Optimise the finding of text areas for highly dynamic pages
* Revamp the settings page with “Fancy Settings”

edit-server.el

* Allow customisation of edit-server-default-major-mode
* Allow edit mode to be set by matched URL
* Tweak detection of MacOS X Emacsen
* Change behaviour of C-x C-s to save to kill-ring
* Persist the buffer-local variables beyond mode changes
* Setup keymap within defvar
* Clean-ups to code to be more idiomatic.

As regular readers of the non-emacs sections of my blog will be aware my recreational coding time is about to be severely curtailed. As it’s been a while since the last release and a number of new features have been added it would be nice to get some wider testing. I therefor am hoping to elicit the help of the Emacs community to check out the code and give the tires a bit of a kick before I push out the final release to “the cloud”. I’d rather not regress behaviour for the 1917 users who get Edit with Emacs from the Chrome store just before I disappear into a haze of nappies and parental responsibilities. The current changes over the last release are:

Extension

* Ignore textareas marked as read only
* Don’t tag areas that are not visible
* General clean-up to use jQuery to find elements
* Explicit CSS for edit button to override page settings
* Handle editable DIV blocks (e.g. Google+)
* Optimise the finding of text areas for highly dynamic pages

edit-server.el

* Allow customisation of edit-server-default-major-mode
* Allow edit mode to be set by matched URL
* Tweak detection of MacOS X Emacsen
* Change behaviour of C-x C-s to save to kill-ring

When I was growing up in our computer filled house I learnt like many people playing with BASIC interpreters embedded into many of the early micro-computers. From there I started to learn about assembler and writing code that runs directly on the processor. However it wasn’t until I picked up my first copy of The C Programming Language (often just called K&R) I truly started my journey towards becoming a real programmer. Pretty much every procedural language since has borrowed from or been developed from the foundations of C. I still own a copy of the first edition which holds a honoured place on my computing bookshelf. It’s hard for me to imagine a better book to learn from for my first “proper” programming language.

C has been subjected to much criticism over it’s long history for being a source of many classic programmer errors. Non programmers may have even seen their computers complaining about a “NULL pointer de-reference” when a program goes bang. This is because the history of C was wrapped up in the need for a powerful low level language (“close to bare metal”) that allowed the development of powerful yet portable systems including the original UNIX which Richie was also involved in the development of. Without C/Unix there would have been no Objective-C, no NeXT and ultimately no Mac OS X which is important for much of the renaissance of Apple now enjoys.

If your looking for true pioneers of modern computing Dennis Ritchie is certainly among them. The world of computing has lost of it’s true innovators and one of my personal computing heroes.

In the early days Apple was pioneering as the nascent home computer market was finding it’s way into the homes of the world. Arguably their most successful product, the iPod, was not a new innovation. Where Apple made up for this was in their execution. A lot of this is a tribute to Jobs’ laser sharp focus on usability. The new Apple did not ship something half working and then worry about fixing it later in software. Nothing was shipped from Cupertino until Jobs was happy they had created a product that worked beautifully and would instantly promote the desire to own one when you played with it. The success of the Apple store is down to the fact that once you’ve touched and fondled their products parting with your cash seems like such a sensible idea.

I have many criticisms of Apple and the way they conduct business in their walled garden. For this reason I’m not a big user of their products or technology. However I happily concede that Apple under Jobs’ leadership have done more for advancing the vision how technology can improve peoples personal world than most companies in the tech sector. A world without Jobs’ vision and focus is certainly a poorer one and he deserves his place in the history books for what he achieved.

For me Facebook’s latest move is eerily familiar of the early days of the web when everyone was vying to be the default web portal in the browser. It didn’t work back then and companies like Yahoo have never really recovered from failing in the land grab. Back then everyone underestimated the demand for search that just worked and when Google offered something that broadly gave you relevant results the curated model of the web died.

However Facebook have a massive advantage now having captured 750m users who visit their site on a regular basis. They didn’t come to Facebook to find cool places on the internet but to interact with their friends. Facebook didn’t invent social networking but they certainly demonstrated that executed properly it was something that lots of people wanted. So far people have been very relaxed about Facebook’s access to all that valuable social information and its use in advertising. Frankly any company that launches any sort of consumer product these days has to have some sort of strategy about how they will interact with Facebook.

Google have know that “social” is going to be a big thing for some time now. They have had several attempts to capture a segment of the market and Google+ is their most serious contender to the space so far. Their reasons for running the service are much like Facebook’s although their principle advantage is not having to worry about how to monetise the service yet. Google’s history has very much been developing ideas and seeing if they become popular before working out how to monetise it. Meanwhile it’s a dangerous time for Facebook as they move towards an IPO where their long-term investors will be looking to cash-out on their investment. If Facebook start hemorrhaging users to alternatives its market value will literally disappear before the investors eyes. In the web-based world where a competitor is literally a click away the last thing they want to do is repeat the experience of MySpace. This would be especially ironic as Facebook was one of the major reasons MySpace went the way it did.

Who will ultimately “win” is an exercise in futurology that is a futile as predicting anything related to the fast changing world of the internet. I personally can’t wait to move away from Facebook and to a service that gives me more control over my data. For now that is Google+ but it’s by no means certain that’s where it will stay. However one thing I’m sure of is the process of taking my data from Google and moving somewhere else will be a lot easier than the exercise has been from Facebook. Coincidentally it’s probably the main reason why I’ll be staying with Google for the time-being.

What do you think of these latest moves? Do you care who “wins” or what the services turn into? Or is the age of social networking the latest in a long line of internet fads that has already peaked?

Setting up a clock page is fairly simple. It’s then just a case of C-c C-x C-i and C-c C-x C-o on the appropriate sub tasks. Dynamic blocks can then be added to your org-document to generate weekly, monthly or annual reports based on the clock lines in the document.

So far the results have been illuminating and certainly shows how optimistic I can be in predicting how much time I spend doing my core job hacking on the code. However one thing that is captured but hard to summarise is interruption cost. I’ve taken to switching task every-time I’m interrupted in person or by phone call (I’m not counting IM/IRC as it’s less disruptive). I can eyeball the raw data and see that some weeks are exceptionally bad for task switching. However what would useful is a break-down of mean and median clock lengths against each task to give some sort of indication of how much straight line hacking I’ve gotten done. I have a feeling the :formula and :formatter options could be used for this but I’ve been struggling to find any example. Does anyone do a similar analysis with their org-mode clock data?

UPDATED: fixed keystrokes.

What does this do?

We had a slightly extended weekend as we headed up North to visit friends in Manchester before heading over to the Yorkshire Hippie enclave of Hebden Bridge for Victoriana. This was going to be our last game before our first child arrives.

Victoriana is a steam-punk style alternate history LARP game based loosely around Victorian era Britain. The brainchild of Mikey and his team of writers it’s an idea that’s kicking around for some time and we are happy it’s been finally realised. The system is fairly lightweight with a combat system which is mainly based around cosmetically modified NERF guns and the occasional traditional LARP sword. However the combat is a fairly small part of the overall experience and certainly not a required skill to enjoy the game. Fliss for example was almost entirely involved in the trials of high society including scandal and match-making of eligible ladies with the appropriate bachelors. My game was almost all concerned with poking things in the cause of science. The science system is fairly free-form where the results are driven by the almost omnipresent Jeeves referees who otherwise blend in with the In Character ambiance of the event. It took a little while to get the hang of it but I tried a few experiments of Friday and together with the rest of the scientists we continued to poke at the strange anomaly with reckless abandon as we formulated our theories. By Sunday we were constructing steam-punk style contraptions with handy copper coloured tape and had a better feeling for the interaction between scientists and engineers. There were other areas of the game I didn’t really see including occultists and of course the working classes who I only occasionally bumped into .

As it was our anniversary weekend we were off site for most of Saturday evening but nevertheless we enjoyed the game immensely. For a game that was 24 hour time in there didn’t seem to be any slack areas where we were just twiddling our thumbs waiting for things to happen. The standard of kit and costume was fantastic including a marvellous automaton by the name of “Number 47″ who was being played magnificently by a first time LARPer. Everyone I spoke to after time out seemed very happy with the way the event had turned out. Mikey has said he’s learnt a lot from the experience and I’m sure there will be some tweaks to the system and organisation for the next event. However a jolly good time was had by all, including the two of us.