Archive for August 20th, 2005

Posted on August 20, 2005 - by jono

The bind

Thanks for the interesting comments about the vim shenanigans. I am aware that ubuntu-base is a meta-package for the essential bits and bobs in Ubuntu, but I find it unusual that vim is in there by default on a distribution so focused on the GUI. As for the suggestion to simply use vim, I doubt that will happen. Oh, and no, I won’t be using emacs.

Last night Emelye (of cello fame) and Jon came over for some Pizza. It was supposed to be dinner, but Sooz and I got stuck in a huge traffic jam and the usual 40 minute commute home took 2 /12 hours. It was not nice and my bladder felt the kind of pressure to unload that a bladder should not normally undergo.

After they left, Sooz and I went to bed and I played with Eclipse for a few hours. Eclipse is one of those things I feel that I should learn. It offers so much functionality and it also provides a consistent base for all of my development. I installed PyDev and attempted to install Subclipse, but Subclipse failed to work correctly. PyDev seems quite nice, but it only seems really suitable for large projects. As an example, if you want to knock up a quick script, you need to create a special Run Configuration and this just gets in the way of being productive quickly.

After helping Sooz with some CSS today for her new site and then submitting a bug to the Nvu developers, I started fiddling with GStreamer Python code. GStreamer is an awesome platform, but at the moment I am finding it difficult to get started with my code. This is largely because I am tracking CVS HEAD (GStreamer 0.9) and I am reluctant to write for the older 0.8 version as it will outdated soon. The main problem is documentation. There is literally no documentation for the Python bindings, and this is making development difficult. The guys on the GStreamer IRC channel have been really helpful, but it is still a challenge if you are largely unfamiliar with the framework.

I am now sat on the couch and Lost In Translation has just finished. Thank God. I would rather skewer myself in the face than watch that pile of crap again. Boring. Boring. Boring. I am not joking here – that film is a huge, incessant pile of utter tosh. I am disappointed in the usually brilliant Bill Murray that he was happy to take part in such utter crap. Boring. Boring. Boring. Did I say it was boring? What a waste of my life…