It’s a very tasty meal, yet simple and easy. Okay, it’s probably not the healthiest option on the menu, but it’s dirt cheap, filling, and full of protein and… starch, I guess. It’s also very versatile; the meal obviously meets the requirements for breakfast, and yet can still stand in as a quick supper or lunch.
For the first twenty-five years of my life, I never would have guessed that potatoes and eggs would complement each other so well. But, as I slowly ration out portions of the final Inspector Morse novel to myself, it seemed like the right thing to do. And I find myself in complete agreement with my namesake on the matter.
Now for some mind bogglingly simple directions. Take a medium frying pan and cover the bottom in oil, place the pan over medium-high heat. Take one medium sized potato, peel and rinse. Chop the potato into home fries. When the oil has reached frying temperature, place the fries in the pan. Let them brown, then flip the fries over. Once they’ve browned on both sides and cooked through, remove them from the pan. Crack two eggs into a bowl, then pour the eggs into the pan. Once the eggs are cooked, remove from the pan and plate with the fries. Serve. This is one of those things that almost takes longer to write than it does to do…
Posted on 28 January 2006 in Uncategorized
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Windows XP won’t run on the Intel-based Macs.
The problem is that the Intel-based Mac don’t have an old-fashioned BIOS. They have a shiny new EFI. Windows XP (32-bit) doesn’t support EFI. Windows XP (64-bit) does, but the current crop of Intel-based Macs have 32-bit processors.
Now, a nice piece of virtualization software like Virtual PC or VMWare or Xen could solve that problem by providing the virtual machine with a virtual BIOS, but nobody’s stepped up to announce a virtualization application for the Intel-based Macs.
Windows Vista, however, will support 32-bit EFI systems. I’m looking forward to being able to retire the old Windows box in favour of a retail copy of Vista. The Windows box’s fans are really loud and annoying. And I’m pretty sure a 2GHz Core Duo will outperform the old 750MHz Duron.
Posted on 11 January 2006 in Uncategorized
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All right, I have given TextMate an honest try. And it has earned a place in my toolkit. A provisional place, but a place none the less. I’ll make a final decision about whether I keep it or not when the demo period expires. Now on to my impressions of the app ad maybe a summary-type thing…
First up, only a small amount of fiddling was necessary to make TextMate look like BBEdit. My preferred syntax colours are in place, the overspill area is shaded, heck there’s even a highlight on the current line. If I was in a hurry, I couldn’t tell the two apart. (That’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.)
But, there is one problem: Why, oh, why can’t I hide that giant ugly tab bar??? I don’t use it, really I completely ignore it. I switch between documents via the directory tree in the drawer off to the side. If there was a toggle somewhere to hide the tab bar, I’d gain two more lines of text and be very, very happy.
And while I’m on the subject of tabs, why do you have to create a ‘project’ to get multiple documents tied to one editor. What if I want to open /Library/Preferences/foo and ~/Library/Preferences/foo? I seem to have to use two windows. So much for ‘tabbed editing’, at least as I understand it. Not that it really matters, since I still type bbedit at the command line and BBEdit will happily open both documents in one window, no project required.
The rendering engine is weird. The anti-aliasing looks different than anywhere else on my system. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s a custom engine. Which would be fine (I have anti-aliasing turned off), but having the option of using bold and italics leads me to want to use Geneva 9 as my base font. (It’s a THINK Pascal thing.) But TextMate doesn’t do variable-width fonts. WTF? Well, it does variable width fonts, it just forces them into monospaced character widths and makes them look incredibly ugly. BBEdit, on the other hand, renders variable width fonts perfectly, but doesn’t offer bold and italics as syntax highlights.
The Templates functionality is cool, and I’ve created a few (CakePHP Model, Controller, and View files, since you ask). But it took a bit of exploring to find the interface to do that. ‘Edit Commands…’, Edit Snippets…’, and ‘Edit Macros…’ all open the same window and that window is where you edit Templates. If you’re going to create three menu items that open the same window, shouldn’t you go all the way and create a menu item for everything that (incredibly useful) window does? Or maybe just one all-encompassing menu item, say, in the Windows menu? [It has come to my attention that there is a menu item in the Windows menu for this Window, but that still leaves 4 separate ways to open the exact same window. -- 12 Jan 2006]
So, all in all, TextMate is a really bitchin’ app for turning out code. But it’s search facilities are lacking and I can’t hide the Tab Bar. I’ll continue using BBEdit for everything but code churning, and 25 days from now I’ll decide if TextMate’s actually worth the money or if I should go back to being a one editor man. Let me repeat, TextMate is better at One Specific Task, BBEdit is better at Everything Else. TextMate is not a BBEdit killer, but it does make a nice supplement.
Posted on 11 January 2006 in Uncategorized
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And the first impression is: What does the icon look like? The website doesn’t show it to me. (Hey, I said it was my first impression, I didn’t promise it would be meaningful.) Second impression is that it seems to have a thorough nice manual available online. BBEdit has a great manual, but it’s only available as a PDF — TextMate sees the PDF and raises a Website. So I’m going to read the manual and add a little bit of bullet point editorial here
- The manual refers to the current version as 1.1. That’s just plain sloppy.
- Auto-updating Projects looks a lot like my ‘Directory Tree in the Documents Drawer’ concept. This is good. the fact that “The refresh delay for network mounted disks will be addressed in a future release” is not so good because I access the files I edit via a DAV share. Hopefully DAV shares don’t count as network mounted disks…
- Open documents are tracked in a tab bar, not the drawer. There goes a whole bunch of pixels I have a better use for, and that tab bar looks unnecessarily huge. What’s wrong with a nice, compact Transmit-style tab bar? A 12″ PowerBook means every pixel counts.
Find and Replace in Projects seems like a kludgy version of BBEdit’s ‘Search Multiple Files’ option. I like the One All-Powerful Find Dialog. And I can’t seem choose an arbitrary folder and then choose whether to recursively or non-recursively search it’s contents. BBEdit uses two check boxes and a button to do that, a simple and effective technique. Contrast the TextMate alternative:
Currently it is not possible to limit the source to other than the full project (with all text files), but as a workaround, for when you want to search only a subset of your project, it is possible to select what you want to search in the project drawer, and drag the selection to the TextMate application icon to create a new scratch project, then perform the find in that project, and close it when done.
The “Go To File” command looks useful, and the free-form matching will either rock my world or annoy the hell out of me. Only time will tell.
- Bookmarks, F2, Kick-ass. That’s awesome. No more shall I have to insert
••• to allow me to jump quickly back to my current place in the document. BbEdit has an MPW-Style Marker system, but it’s not really conducive to the one-off ‘go away, jump back’ sort of action. Point to TextMate. Especially since it’s the same interface as setting breakpoints in Think Pascal (nostalgia counts for a lot right this second).
- Folding! Ah, sweet, sweet code folding.
- Function Pop-up. Good.
- Much like Go To File, auto-pairing and completion will either make me ten times more productive or just get turned off.
- The intelligent indenting of pasted text sounds cool.
- The Find dialog seems passable, but I’ll miss BBEdit’s additional Find Modifiers (Start At Top, Wrap Around, Search Selection Only, Extend Selection, etc.) This could be a serious problem. I search far more often than I miss code-folding.
- The increase/decrease indent command keys are the same as BBEdit. That’s good, because that was the one thing that repeatedly tripped me up in Kate.
- Check Spelling As You Type. Sweet, I miss this in BBEdit, but not enough to have remembered it for the Text Editor Wish List.
- Snippets. I use Textpander at the moment. It’s nice to be able to drop an RFC 822 formatted date into any application, so I’ll probably stick with Textpander for the immediate future.
- The ability to execute shell commands and filters in any document. I love Worksheets, after all, I used MPW for years, but I really like the fact that BBEdit segregates Worksheets and regular editor windows, and the Scripts menu fits my needs almost perfectly. Still, at least TextMate has the features.
- I’m skipping the more advanced bits for now because I want to test if (for me) TextMate is better for churning out code than BBEdit. If it can’t do that, then all the Macros in the world won’t save it.
- The printing options look excellent. TextMate can do the BBEdit-style header and that’s exactly what I want.
- Atomic saves are an option? The proper way to save a file on an HFS system is to create a temp file, save the new version in the temp file, swap the data forks of the old file and the temp file, then delete the temp file. Apparently TextMate doesn’t do that. I guess there are advantages to being an old school Mac application after all.
- An option to not use extended attributes to avoid creating dot-underscore files? Delicious. The fact that I can’t limit that behaviour to DAV shares: a bit frustrating.
And that’s the manual. The Find functionality seems rather primitive and I’m going to have to fiddle with the syntax colouring defaults, but I’d say TextMate is still in with a running chance. Now I guess I should actually launch the application.
Posted on 8 January 2006 in Uncategorized
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I’m a BBEdit guy. I’ve been using BBEdit in various incarnations (BBEdit Lite/TextWrangler/BBEdit proper) for over a decade now. Before that I churned out code in THINK Pascal. I also spent some time with MPW, but MPW and BBEdit share more than a few ideas about text editing. The only real diversion from the BBEdit model I’ve made was a brief foray into the world of Kate on a Linux system. I liked Kate, it had a lot of nice features, but I still came back to BBEdit in the end. I should probably also mention that I keep a copy of SubEthaEdit around so that I can (occasionally) connect up with someone else’s machine and co-operatively debug their code without fighting over a keyboard – it’s a one trick pony for me, and I only need that trick once in a blue moon, but it does the job perfectly when called upon.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to make the jump to another editor if the advantages make it worthwhile. And thus, this brief series of posts. With the release of TextMate 1.5 I have decided to give it a try for, well, two reasons mainly: the first is that it has code folding, and I’ve been finding myself missing code folding in BBEdit more and more of late; the second is the fact that the RoR masses adore it. The first reason is rather more important to me than the second.
Plus, I’m starting the coding phase of a new project this weekend so it seems like an ideal chance to give TextMate the sink or swim test.
But before I leap in, I want to arrange some criteria so that I don’t end up spending €39 based on an ‘ooh, shiny’ reaction only to come back to BBEdit in 3 weeks and realize I wasted my money on something I didn’t need. So, off the top of my head, the major requirements I have in a text editor:
- MPW 9, not anti-aliased. I love this font, it looks awful anti-aliased. I use it everywhere I deal with text, which at the moment is pretty much just BBEdit, Terminal, Apple Mail and MarsEdit. This is a definite dealbreaker, if I can’t have this I won’t even try to work around it. Bonus points will be awarded if I don’t have to fiddle with
defaults to get it.
- Regular Expression based Searching (and Replacing). Approximately 10% of the time I’m in BBEdit is spent with a temporary documents throwing Search and Replace patterns at some text. If an editor can’t do that, I don’t want anything to do with it.
- Syntax Highliting. In my choice of colours. I have the colours I like (pretty much the MPW defaults) and anything else seems wrong. If I have to jump through a lot of hoops to get my colours applied consistently, I won’t bother and I’ll drop the editor.
- Documents Drawer. This is a recent addition to the list, but ever so wonderful. Tabs might work, but the problem is capacity. I just checked, on my 12″ screen BBEdit’s Document drawer holds 34 files without scrolling. I can’t imagine how 34 tabs could be displayed and still be usable. I want a list of files down the side and one editor. When I click a file, it opens in the editor, when I click another file it opens in the same editor, replacing the previous file. They’re both still open, though.
- A Functions Pop-up menu. I need to be able to jump right to a given function/procedure/etc. in a file. This is also a deal-breaker.
- A BBEdit-style header on printouts. BBEdit gives the filename, the time and date of printing and a page n of m entry in the header. If I can’t have that, I’m not interested.
- Width indicator. BBEdit used to have a Phillip Bar, a little indicator that showed the 80th column. in recent versions this changed and beyond the 80th column (or, as I have it set, the 96th column), the background is light grey instead of white. This is really useful for making sure that the text you’re writing will fit the width of the page you’re going to print it out on. It’s also a good indicator that your line of code is too damn long or you’ve nested too many if statements.
And, of course, there’s always a wishlist. This is the stuff I want, but BBEdit doesn’t provide:
- Markdown syntax colouring. BBEdit’s Syntax Colouring Engine can’t do Markdown easily, I accept this because I write most of my Markdown-formatted text in MarsEdit. Still, it would be nice to have.
- A Nested Directory Tree in the Document drawer. I use CakePHP a lot and it has a very specific directory layout and file naming scheme. Which means that in a flat listing, I end up with a lot of files named index.php and show.php with no way of distinguishing them in the list. Having the drawer reflect the directory tree would automagically keep them all organized.
- A Documents Drawer that takes up less space. This is probably a physical impossibility, but it would be a really big feather in the cap of whoever provides it. As I said, I have spend most of my time on a 12″ PowerBook, so screen space is at a premium. I’ll happily auto-hide the Dock, but I just can’t bring myself to hide the Documents Drawer. (Probably because it’s a Drawer and thus the window has to be resized when it’s shown or hidden. So there’s the solution, I guess, a floating Documents Palette that only shows itself when I fling the mouse against the left hand side of the screen. (The mouse gets flung against the right hand side when I want to scroll — getting in the way of my scrolling would just piss me off.))
- Code Folding. This is a major bonus to whoever provides it. It’s the one thing I really miss in BBEdit.
In fact Code Folding is so valuable to me, I’m willing to forget the “It’s time to turn envy into pride and end your desire for Windows- and UNIX-based editors once and for all” ad campaign that heralded the release of TextMate. That campaign left a really bad taste in my mouth. Which is probably the sort of reaction that led to that message getting scrubbed from the face of the Earth. (Note to future Revisionist Historians: the Internet Archive doesn’t store images, so put your questionable slogans in image files. Because once you pull that file off the server, it will linger a while in Google’s cache and then disappear forever.) Just to drive the reasons I am so prejudiced against TextMate home, here’s an excerpt from John Gruber’s Linked List for 6 October, 2004:
TextMate Released ★
Supposed BBEdit-killer from Allan Odgaard. I find it telling that the web page starts with the supposition that Mac users envy Windows text editors.
2lmc Spool on TextMate ★
10-minute summary. Blech is unimpressed, as am I.
Michael Tsai on TextMate ★
Michael Tsai, in a very astute first look at TextMate:
TextMate doesn’t feel like BBEdit, CodeWarrior, Alpha, QUED/M, or Symantec’s IDE. It also doesn’t feel like ProjectBuilder, Project Builder, Xcode, or third-party NSTextView-based editors such as SubEthaEdit and TeXShop. As a result, I think it feels all wrong, but TextMate wasn’t designed for old Mac hands like me. It was designed for switchers. I would have a hard time switching to another platform if it lacked an editor that felt right, so I can certainly understand MacroMates’ motivation here. I’m rooting for their success in making switchers feel at home on the Mac.
But enough of the past, I’m going to give TextMate an honest going and see how it does.
Posted on 7 January 2006 in Uncategorized
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