It was a pretty day in Montreal today, and since I was taking care of Amita today I knew I wasn't going to get any computer stuff done. So I decided to take care of some tasks that needed doing around the house -- cleaning up our storage room, changing some light bulbs, fixing some furniture and putting plastic on the windows for winter.
This is one of my least favorite jobs for preparing for winter. Probably the biggest sink of heat for an apartment is the windows and doors, so we do our best to insulate them. Doors get insulated foam around the cracks, and windows get covered in a thin film of clear plastic, which forms a pocket of air and provides an extra insulating barrier from the outside. It sounds crazy, but it's remarkably effective -- it really makes the difference between a cold house and a cozy home.
It's extremely labor-intensive, though: it involves putting up lots of double-sided tape, cutting just-right rectangles of gossamer micron-thin plastic sheeting, climbing up and down ladders, hanging, measuring, moving. Probably the silliest part is that you blow on the plastic with a hot hair drier to make it contract tightly over the window so it's easier to see out. That takes like 10 minutes to do.
Last year I waited until mid-January to do the job, and we were all walking around the house shivering and wheezing. This year I'm getting it done before winter's really upon us, but that doesn't mean I like it any better. I guess I'll just be happy when it's done.
tags: winter montreal insulation plastic
My JavaScript workbench
So, I've been working on making a Wikiwyg plugin for PmWiki. Wikiwyg is an ingenious Javascript library for doing WYSIWYG editing in the browser, but keeping all communications with the server in wiki syntax. Every wiki engine should be using it, but for some reason it's not well-implemented. I think it's mostly a community-marketing problem, but that's a separate subject.
I want to eventually get it working on Wikitravel, which runs MediaWiki, but I wanted to give it a try on an little more deterministic wiki syntax. So I started an extension for PmWiki. I've learned a lot so far; I'm far from done, but if you use darcs you can see my work so far by running:
darcs get http://evan.prodromou.name/darcs/pmwikiwyg/
Since the code's mostly in Javascript, I've been getting my JS workbench back into shape. By "workbench", of course, I mean "loose collection of tools for documentation, debugging, and editing". For documentation, I've been using the excellent JavaScript and DOM docs from Mozilla Developer Center -- itself a wiki. The docs are (almost) complete, well-written, and well organized. And, of course, Free -- it's all under the CC attribution-sharealike.
For debugging, I've been using the Venkman JavaScript debugger for Firefox. It's been a while since I've worked with a half-decent debugger, so it's been a pleasure to use.
And for editing, I'm sticking to my favorite programmer's editor, JED. I first started using JED because it had the same name as the founder of Spock Mountain Research Labs, but eventually I've grown to like it on its own merits. I was a longtime Emacs addict, and JED has been my editorial methadone. It's got all of Emacs's advantages -- same keyset, different but valuable extensibility -- without the long load times and heavy weight on system resources. I'm at the point where JED is my only editor.
One nice thing about JED is that writing language modes is pretty easy, so there are a lot of them out there. I found a half-decent one for JavaScript floating around on the Internet a few years ago, and it seems to still be the best there is.
As mentioned above, I've pretty much transitioned fully to Darcs as my version control system for whatever projects I can help it. It's a great piece of software -- all the strengths of GNU arch without the idiosyncratic naming conventions.
And that's my workbench. It's no Eclipse, but I'm having fun working with these tools.