Crank it up a notch

I left the office very late today. So late in fact I didn't get home until past 11. The feature I've been working on for the last few weeks has been turned on by default in the current baseline and it has exposed a few bugs. I'll hasten to point out these aren't bugs in my code but areas of code that have had their previously untested corner cases busted.

To add pressure to the mix my HD drive got swapped out yesterday as it was looking like it was due to die any moment (the smartmontools giving a heads up). However in common with most IT departments the new drive had the default image installed which is a fair way away from where I was. Its like driving an unfamiliar car and certainly hit my productivity for the day. Luckily my .emacs was proved to handle the regression in emacs version gracefully so I didn't have to battle with my text editor.

I have discovered the power of screen after I had dismissed it many moons ago because its primary key binding conflicts with emacs. I'm currently upgrading my work box to the latest SuSE which requires a little messing around with apt and friends. Screen allows me to start the process running in a terminal at work and then just close the session leaving it running in the background. I can then login from home and re-attach to the terminal as though I never left. Its more useful than you realise as staying in the same terminal session keeps a lot of useful context like command histories which stay available to you. You can even have multiple screen sessions pointing at the same display if your moving around a lot.

Anyway enough of this geeking, I need some sleep before tomorrows hack-a-thon.