It’s Tool Time!
When I’m in the middle of battle a project, I don’t usually stop to write a script or work on configuring my tools until I get to a calm in the storm. Instead I jot that down on my todos and, when things settle down, I work on that todo list.[1] Maybe it’s because I’m in a new place, or maybe because my work is now slightly different, but I’ve been quite productive in sharpening my tools in this lull.
- In a previous post, I talked about how I’ve configured NTEmacs and Cygwin to play together nicely. I’ve also talked about Icicles, which really has changed how I open new Emacs buffers.
- We keep the version information for our apps in a static file that has an HTML table snippet. I always forget to up the version. So today I finished up my Python script that does it for me. It reads the latest revision from source control, adds one to it, and then puts that and the present date to the version file. It wasn’t as trivial as I thought it was going to be, but it works well.
- I’ve been having problems with doing builds — for some reason, our Ant setup always thought I was running on Unix, which is bad for our setup[2]. After some checking and even an embarrassing support ticket, I found out that I was supposed to be using a batch file to do the builds. Of course no one told I was supposed to. Anyway, the Batch file set some values on the command line which I then put in my ~/.antrc file. And, like magic, my problem was solved.
- I’ve been annoyed with Window’s Console for a long time and I’m also annoyed that can’t use RXVT in my Cygwin work now. Today I stumbled upon Console2 and I’m impressed. It’s not as nice as iTerm, but it’s still better than the alternative. Just the fact that I can keep several Bash prompts in a unified Window is nice. I did have to tweak a few keyboard shortcuts but the fact that I could tweak that means that it’s better than the default.
- I implemented this hack (1/3 down the page) that let’s you easily make an alias. Again, it has already made things easier for me, since I now look for thing that I should make an alias for, and do it quick-and-easy.
Anyone else take time out to sharpen tools? Do you wish to share? Comment below or do a trackback to your blog post on it.
[1] Sometimes I do stop everything and work on something if I’m really annoyed or something is in my way. But I try really hard to minimize that. I can get too involved in sharpening my tools instead of working on my assigned projects.
[2] Of course, I was running Ant in Bash, but that turned out not to be the problem.
Huh?