Gradwell hosting moving up in the world!

I have a build process! I’ve been working on my own for so long I’ve never needed one before, but now I’m part of a team it’s suddenly very much required. It’s simple too. I edit the files, I try to compile them, when they work I check them into CVS. Then I have an Ant target which pulls the latest source from CVS and compiles it to the shared libs location for Tomcat. I then restart the server. All is full of love. Neat and it only took a day to setup! I’ve got CVS integration in Vim and a menu item that triggers the build through SSH.

Been messing about with irssi, which is definitely better than either ircII or BitchX. BitchX is the Emacs of IRC clients, funky and colourful though it is. Irssi is much more chill and is scriptable in Perl. I prefer the ircII scroll style of just letting text go off the top of the screen though. That way I can just scroll up with my wheel to see what’s been going on. Then again it wouldn’t be able to do it’s funky windows business. It doesn’t matter too much now I’ve worked out how to scroll up! In OS X, there is no meta key by default. There is an option in Terminal to use the option key though. Why the fuck this isn’t turned on by default I don’t know. I turned on a few other things as well, like terminal bell.

Using IRC and Irssi’s Perl support has made me think lots about scripting and bots. Here is a quick rundown of the script ideas I’ve had in the last few days:

• Bot to post to Hype
• Bot to notify the #hypothetical channel when somebody posts to Hype
• Bot to post here
• Bot to allow posting to a Wiki

And some Irssi scripts using Mail::Glue, including:

• Display current iTunes track
• Interface with iCal, adding events.

Some of the thinking here is based around the idea that IRC can serve as a meeting place. The nice thing about IRC as a meeting place is that you can start prefixing things with slashes and you’ve got a rich interface to the outside world.

Say I was chatting to a business contact and we agreed to set up a real world meeting, I could use an Irssi script or a bot to record the date and time of that meeting. Personally I could switch to iCal on my desktop, but IRC would provide a centralised way for groups to co-ordinate and save to a shared server. This server could then pump out data to our GUI calendering clients.

Another example, I’m chatting and I need to make a note. A bot connected to a Wiki lets me shoot a note straight on to the end of a page.

These ideas center on one thing, that sometimes you need to just quickly make a sticky. IRC is a simple beast, with a shallow (but broad) interface system. Implementations of bots and scripts tend to provide a simple way of doing a straighforward task. If I want to post to a Wiki, why do I have to go through three page requests in a GUI, when I can set up my IRC client with defaults and then just post with a one line command. The flexibility and intuitivity of a GUI is lost, but speed is gained in it’s place. And pretty colours. Pretty colours on black.

I unsubbed from www-style. it’s really high volume at the moment with the 2.1 comments and stuff and it’s all really boring.

Plus I realised that they don’t really make the rules. They have done in the past, but now they seem more interested in writing specifications for concepts agreed in the browser-space (to some extent at least). Secondly, they never, ever, listened to my POV anyway. Oh well.

Sorry, haven’t been in a bloggy mood recently. Got to write up Kenya, but at the same time work is grindingly hard at the minute and so leaves little time for free thinking.

I just wanted to comment on the passing of Webmonkey, which has announced it’s closing. It’s such a sad thing. Webmonkey taught me how to do HTML. I wouldn’t have my career if it wasn’t for Mulder’s CSS tutorial, Thau’s JS tutorial and all the rest. I’ve referred countless people to the site to cut their web teeth and I don’t know where I’ll point them to now. I hope that somebody steps up to save them, or just to keep the site up.

Webmonkey RIP.

Does your browser implement it? Thanks Dave!

Brainfuck fucked my brain. It’s an interesting language to program in, modeling a very simple computer really, requiring extensive thought about the underlying fabric of my computer. I use if and while a whole lot so I think it’s good that I should have to think about how those constructs are implemented at the next level down. Brainfuck provides some of that insight.

The funniest bit was when I went to Dorkbot last night and was trying to tell a guy I met at the Furtherfield party about Brainfuck. He’d not heard of it, so I asked another programmer I’d met there if he’d done any Brainfuck, I said it just as the room went quiet in preparation for the next talk. “Yeah mate, I can sort you out some Brainfuck, how much do you need? Yeah wicked mate.”

Other than that I’ve just been working really. Greg has joined the team and is getting up to speed on much of the stuff that I’ve been doing in the last year. That’s no mean feat, and at first I overestimated Greg’s ability to become productive. That’s not a criticism of Greg in any way, I was way off when I thought he would be able to start producing code in the first days. So I’ve scaled my expectations back to something approaching normal, giving Greg space to work on a testing system in VB, which he knows, and to become familiar with the new ground.

Well, back to cold grey England, slightly dazed but getting into the routine again. I’ve got work to do today indeed.

We got back on Friday morning at about nine, I delt with 1,297 emails and then passed out. Since then I’ve been pottering around and spending a lot of time on my photo gallery.

On which note, I have hacked the gallery so that it paginates the list of galleries, so I can have more than ten, and uploaded the following sets of photos, finally:

• Thickthorn and the cricket
• Louise’s birthday
• The Weather Project at the Tate Modern
• The party!
• Christmas
• Kenya!

Blogs for the holiday to come in the next week or so. So much to tell!