Misadventures in Developing

Emacs splash screen

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:19:00 +0000

OK. I am an Emacs users. Whenever I am working at a command prompt I go right for Emacs. I can get around with vi, but I cut my teeth on Jove (Johnathon's own version of Emacs) and it's what I like.

Recently I have been working on some newly setup servers and every time I start Emacs, I get that stupid splash screen.

Well, here is how to get it to go away.

Edit you .emacs file ($HOME/.emacs) and add the following line.

(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)

and Bye Bye splash screen

The eternal defrag

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:21:00 +0000

After complaining out loud about how long it took my laptop to boot up at work, a co-worker asked me how long it had been since my last de-fragmented my hard drive. Well, I had no idea when the last time was so I went to go do that. A couple of minutes later, my co-worker sent me an email with a .bat file and a new de-fragmentation tool called Contig (well not new but new to me).

The batch file simple did this:



c:
cd \
contig.exe -s .
defrag -f c:

contig.exe -s .
defrag -f c:

contig.exe -s .
defrag -f c:

contig.exe -s .
defrag -f c:

I started this up before I went to bed, the first run indicating that I was more than 30% fragmented. In the morning, it reported 0% fragmented. When I got to the office, it took about 10 minutes to boot up and have all my applications running (Outlook, FireFox, Eclipse, IM) compared to 20-30 minutes previously.

The moral of the story, don't neglect to maintain you pc. Just like you car needs to have the oil changed and the tires rotated, so too does your pc need to be de-fragmented and maintained.

Expected identifier, string or number

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:20:00 +0000

In another case of "It works in FireFox" this crazy IE error has caused me nothing but problems.

Using Prototype and developing an Ajax application, kept running into this error while testing in IE. Winds up I am not the only one but it's still somewhat elusive.


new Ajax.Updater('term_item', 'index.pl', {
  method: 'get',
  parameters: {
    command: 'item/view',
    termlist: 'testlist',
    termstatus: '0',
  },
  evalScripts: true
});

Everything looks fine, and works fine in Firefox, but load this up in Internat Explorer and it immediately error.

The cause, the extra comma after termstats: '0', in the parameters.

Just remove the extra comma and everything works fine.

Go figure.