Peter Williams

Emacs 22

On Mr Yegge’s suggestion I recently upgraded to Emacs 22. I needed to do a Japanese localization of the web app on which I was working so I decide that now was the time to upgrade since apparently version 22 is pretty stable, even though it is not yet released. That has to be the best 20 minutes I have spent in a long time. Emacs 22 actually handles non-Latin-1 character correctly. Now I can use my favorite IDE even when I am working with non-English content which is pretty much all the time.

While searching for a Windows binary (I really miss Ubuntu) I ran across EmacsW32¹ which has a Windows installer which includes both the W32 extensions and a CVS snapshot build of Emacs 22. If you are an Emacs user, or you think you might like to wield the most powerful text manipulation tool in existence, go read Mr Yegge’s article and then upgrade to Emacs 22. And if you are on Windows EmacsW32 works beautifully. You will not be disappointed.

A Better Ruby Profiler

Mr Savage and Shugo Maeda have released ruby-prof 0.4.0. I have to admit that I have not had much need for a profiler in Ruby (For Rails or otherwise) so far but it is nice to know that there is a decent profiler available when, and if, I need one.

The addition of a call graph report is absolutely vital and having them in a cross referenced HTML report is pretty sweet. I have used call graph profiling reports in the past but it was always with plain text reports. Following a call path in a plain text report can be little tedious at times. I expect that being able to follow links to particular call would make things quite a bit easier.

Father’s Day 2006

It was a wonderful day. We did not have any big plans, so I got to play with the kids around the house which was very nice.

Elliot and I went for a short bike ride on Big Dry Creek Trail. The creek has water in this time of year and was very pretty. Elliot especially likes to throw sticks into the water and watch them float away.

Catherine had these really cute shirts made for the kids and facilitated a wonderful day the kids and I. All in all a nearly perfect day.

RailsConf Ticket

I am not going to be able to attend RailsConf this year. That means I have one RailsConf ticket I would like to sell at face value ($400 US). I also have a conference rate ($100/night) hotel reservation for June 22-26 at the Wyndham O’Hare that I will transfer to whomever buys the ticket. If you are intetest please email me at pezra@barelyenough.org.

Audrey Can Stand

Audrey stood up all by herself for the first a week ago today. I was brushing Elliot’s teeth and she was playing on the floor near by. When I looked down I saw that she had pulled herself into a standing position using Elliot’s stool. By Saturday, two days later, she was pretty much standing all the time and had even started cruising a little.

This has been a big couple weeks for Audrey. She also started saying “hi” while waving recently, which is super cute. And it sounds like she might be close to saying “Elliot”. She loves Elliot so much I will not be surprised if that is her next work. I expect it will come well before mommy or daddy.

One of the interesting things about having two children is being able to compare and contrast them. Elliot tends to learn skills gradually. It took him a significantly longer time (weeks) to become skilled at standing and he fell down a lot more. But he started trying to stand at a much younger age than Audrey and keep at it doggedly until he had figured it out. Audrey, on the other hand, seems to learn really quickly in spurts. She can go weeks with out gaining any noticeable skills and then in a matter of hours, or days, she learns some skill to a notable level of competence. For example, she showed little interest in standing until last Thursday. When she decided to start standing, though, it took her less than 3 days to become adept at standing, including reliably falling into a sitting position (rather than on her head).

I must say that I am not sure I am ready for two toddlers. Two kids running in opposite directions scares me a fair bit.