The B-Grade Box

My special lady-friend and I have shared our suburban Melbourne house for ten years now. (Yes, I am getting very old.) It is a fairly small three-bedroom house but should be adequate for just two people. However, lately the level of clutter has started to bother both of us so we have decided to have a grand clean-out day tomorrow - a long overdue event.

Obviously all this household clutter is not my fault, or my wife's. Blame surely must rest upon Satan himself, the Capitalist society that we live in. Evil marketing executives spend their lives coming up with ingenious jingles and commercials to get us to buy their client's crap, and Cathy and I are just powerless victims. How could I have lived without this iPod docking-station alarm-clock or that bass guitar? (These will both be on eBay soon, to gather dust in some other poor schmuck's back room.)

So even with a spare room each, we are running out of room for our junk. I suffer from the hoarding problem the worst. My spare room filled up with 80s 8-bit computer parts about six-months after we moved in. Even after numerous clean-ups, I can barely get from the door to the iMac that I am typing on now (which will not go on eBay). My 11-metre by 8-metre garage should easily store two cars and an ample workshop, but instead has one small car (a 240Z) and enough junk to make me depressed every time I enter it. I'll need therapy before I can start working on that problem.

Anyway, to the point. I might start documenting some of the ideas that I come up with to face my hoarding problem on this humble blog. Then again, this may be the only time that I am bored enough to try to bore you with the details. Time will tell.

The first step I have taken, to get one step ahead of Cathy on tomorrow's clean-out day, is to make a B-Grade Box.

Apart from hoarding, and my many other vices (like $2 pizza slices), I have a once secret problem - the action movies of Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal. JB Hi-Fi has been selling them for about $7 for the past year and every time I visit that store I walk out with at least 4 of them. My DVD rack has filled with movies that, although guilty pleasures of mine, are undoubtedly B-grade trash.

It is inevitable that I will want to rewatch J.V.C.D. play his own twin (in Double Impact, and again in Maximum Risk), and how could I get through life without being able to hear Segal utter the classic words "I'm going to take you to the bank, Senator Trent. The Blood Bank." any time I wish? Selling my collection of class B-grade action is out of the question. The answer?

I threw all of the plastic cases in the recycling bin. I have kept the discs and the paper covers and am storing my B-grade movies like the pirates down at your local flea-market. The 32 bad action movies that I have bought in the last year now fit into the shelf-space of just 4 plastic DVD cases. I'm no mathematician, but I am pretty sure that is a dramatic reduction of space required to store these movies. I'm a genius.

I could take this a step further by ripping the movies from the discs that I bought legitimately and recycling the slips and discs as well, but I am pretty sure the FBI would kick my door down and arrest me before I got finished with that little exercise.

The DVD problem is an easy one, because they are mostly air unless you store them like a pirate. A much bigger problem for me is the ridiculous number of books that I own. The book fetish runs much deeper than my action movie problem. I would hate to think how much money I have given Borders over the past ten years. Worse than that, I haven't even read half of the books on my shelf, despite the enormous cost.

Quite a few of them are useless. What am I going to do with Programming Windows by Charles Petzold that cost me $130 and weighs about ten kilos? I use Windows very rarely these days, and I haven't created a WinMain for centuries. I estimate the book is worth about $2 now, but I know that I will have a lot of trouble putting it into the recycling bin. This is one of at least 30-40 obsolete computer books that I own. I could have bought another Datsun with that cash. Thankfully I stopped buying computer books (mostly) a few years ago. I try to limit myself to a few a year now. I'm on a hormone patch that helps me a lot.

My summer project: IcePin - a Ruby editor in Ruby

I read recently that a guy called Daniel Lucraft has written a text-editor in Ruby called Redcar. It was a relieft to see that there is more than one person silly enough to do what I have spent the last couple of months doing.

My editor is called Icepin. Here is a screen-shot (click for full-size):


Daniel's editor is a clone of TextMate for Gnome. Icepin is a clone of Emacs for Mac/Linux/whatever using the wxRuby toolkit. I did not look at the Emacs source-code at all, but have certainly copied many of the things that I like about Emacs. Icepin is 100% pure Ruby.

So why, you may ask, have I wasted countless hours building my own editor when there are so many excellent editors available? Why does anyone do anything, I guess. Personally, I loved using Emacs because of the huge number of available modules. However...

...there was a plugin that I was using called yasnippet that had a bug in it (which is now fixed). I tried to fix it myself and realized that as much as I tried, I really couldn't learn to love LISP. I really want to love it, I promise, but I am possibly just not smart enough to program anything useful in it.

My day job is Ruby programming and I am fairly comfortable with it. So the obvious choice would be to use TextMate, which allows you to write extensions in Ruby/Python/etc. However TextMate does not have split windows, and I really cannot live without them. TextMate 2 (with split windows) seems to be vapourware.

As you can see from my screenshot, IcePin has split windows. It has basic editing features, unlimited undo, search/replace, syntax highlighting, unlimited buffers and that is about it. It is about 5x as good as Windows Notepad, as opposed to about 100x to 1000x as good for most popular editors (TextMate, Emacs, vim, etc). I am guessing that it is nowhere near as powerful as Daniel Lucraft's Redcar editor, but I haven't had the chance to try his out.

I haven't added a new feature to IcePin in about 3 weeks and I think I may have become bored with it. I have been using it exclusively for all my programming since the start of the year (when it was two weeks old, called Roomacs and running in a terminal using ncurses) and I must say it is fun to use your own software all day. It is also nice to be the only user world-wide, in a strange way. Now it is at the stage that it does everything that I need, I think I will leave it for a while and play with another pet project.

Shelfintosh

My desk at The OpenHub has been getting crazy messy lately so I decided that I needed to either throw away some junk or come up with a storage solution. Since I am a die-hard hoarder, I decided on the latter.

Measuring up the desk, I didn't have a lot of room once the MacBook and 24" screen were in place. I needed something tall and narrow. I didn't like the look of the stacking document trays at the newsagent - they were expensive and nasty - so I decided to make a little bookshelf. I need to get my cabinet-making skills as I am trying to convince my wife that I can build us a new kitchen, rather than spending $20,000.

Since I needed a tall and narrow bookshelf that would fit in only about 28cm of space, I decided to keep with the nerdy environment at work and build my shelves using an Apple Macintosh as a template. Here is the finished Shelfintosh, next to my template:

The template Mac Classic was sitting quite close to the table-saw during the construction of of the bookshelf, so chances are it is full of MDF dust now. Poor thing.

Three plastic document trays would have cost me about $15 at Officeworks, but I built my nerdy bookshelf using about $4 of 12mm MDF. If I hadn't spent about $1k in tools, I think you would agree that I am well ahead.

P. S. Yes, I have undeleted my blog. For my dozen or so readers, I am sure this is fantastic news. I will be writing sporadically, as always. I think the theme will be a bit different to my old blog. Mostly it will be showing the results of some little project, like this post. Of course most of my projects are programming related, so it will still be an unashamedly nerdy blog.

My next post will be about a couple of useful scripts that I am working on to automagically arrange my windows in Mac OS X, after a very useful tip-off from my desk-buddy John.

I deleted my blog

Hello web-surfer,

I deleted my blog because I was sick of it. Sorry for any inconvenience. It was 71 posts of shit.

Thanks,

Clinton.