Shiny Things

Writing

Years ago I started writing Emacs Mastery: Attaining Coding Supremacy, though I’ll probably never complete it. I’m considering making it freely available on the Web. Please vist the book’s Leanpub page, review the table of contents there, and let me know what else you think the book should cover. Here is the introduction:

Emacs is a master craftsman’s tool. No, wait — Emacs is an empty canvas, complete with brushes, paints (oil and acrylic), charcoal, scrapers, sponges, turpentine, and a nuclear-powered color wheel.

Since I’m a musician and not a woodworker or painter, here’s an analogy I can get behind: Emacs is a synthesizer. At first, you play the presets and have fun making music. You don’t need all those knobs, but you do wonder what they’re for. One day you’re unhappy with the preset bass sound you’re using — it needs a sharper attack, a longer decay, and a brighter sound. You tweak a few knobs. They don’t do what you want at first, but after a bit of reading the manual (ugh!) you start to understand what some of them do and you achieve that sound you were looking for.

After reading more of the manual you begin to understand how the synth creates sounds and what’s really going on when you turn those knobs. You start finding things that the synth can do that you never imagined it could. Not only that, getting the sounds you want is easier so you’re spending less time tweaking knobs and more time making music.

Meanwhile, you’ve come across terms like “subtractive synthesis”, “wavetables”, and “frequency modulation” so you start reading up on what those things mean. You’re learning how sound synthesis works and that there are different ways of creating sounds. This knowledge helps you create new sounds and textures, opening up a universe of sound explosions you use to create mega-hit after mega-hit making you so mega-rich you mega-retire and give all your money to charity. A combination music/philanthropy prize is named after you and statues to you are erected everywhere.

That’s Emacs.

I’ve been using Emacs since about 1982, and I still discover new things it can do or new ways to be more efficient. It may not be possible to know all there is to know about Emacs, but that’s not the point. The point is to have a tool that helps me create what I want and be more efficient so I can create more. And knobs. Lots of knobs.

Emacs Mastery: Attaining Coding Supremacy (unpublished) by Jim Menard

Introduction to Ruby for Mac OS X was originally published as the cover article in MacTech Magazine 19.3, March 2003.

Building Applications with Berkeley DB Java Edition appeared in the September 2004 issue of the Java Developer’s Journal. Unfortunately, it’s no longer available. I did find a copy of the article on some other site, but it’s not formatted correctly at all. See below for a link to the code that accompanies the article.

Unit Testing with OCUnit was published on O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter on April 23, 2004. As with the previous article, it’s no longer avaiable. See below for a link to the code that accompanies the article. The article was later picked up by OSNews. An update to the article: the latest release of TestKit supports XCode.

Gotta link to my blog, though I don’t update it as often as I should.

The Polyglot Programmer, a talk given to the Connecticut CTO Club in March of 2012 and again at a Brown Bag Talk at ideeli the next month. These are raw notes to myself, not a polished slide presentation.

The talk Ruby on Rails – An Introduction was given to the New York City CTO Club in July of 2006. Hint: hover your mouse over the lower right corner of the slides for a control panel.

The discusson/talk Alternate Data Storage Technologies was given to the New York City CTO Club on April 14, 2004. (HTML only.)

A Ruby talk given to the New York City CTO Club on July 10, 2001. (HTML and PDF available.)

Bride of Dark and Stormy

I entered a number of sentences into the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest contest in 1998. Two of them were selected and published in Bride of Dark and Stormy, compiled by Scott Rice.

The alien stared at Captain Veronica Saunders with a warmth not unlike that found on certain of Pluto’s outer moons, its black, scaly claws flexing in and out, in and out, its long powerful tail wrapped unmercifully around her curvaceous chest, pinning her arms to her sides, its two-hundred piggy little eyes peering into her very soul with a singularly steady gaze, and it found itself wishing in some dim portion of its tiny brain that this one wouldn’t scream so much while being peeled.

That sentence was featured on the front page of a local California paper the same year. Contest founder Scott Rice sent me a copy of the front page, for which I am eternally grateful. I lost it, for which I am eternally pissed off.

I had originally written “…wouldn’t scream so much whilst being peeled,” but it was changed to “while” in the book. I prefer “whilst”, but then I do tend to be a touch sesquipedalian.

The second entry:

Firmly, almost indignantly, Thornton Entwhistle straightened his toupee and checked his lapels for stray specks of lint as he stood in front of the firmly closed mahogany door and again rehearsed his request for a legal pad all his own.

Code

Here are links to the code that accompanies some of my writings.