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My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable
July 4, 2003
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Word peeps? This is Josiah sending a rant out your way, why? Because Annie is wrangling through her personal web page, re-doing the beast as she sees fit. There are at least a couple hundred html files, and around 6-700 images. I know I'd probably just blow the beast away if mine was that huge and I had to re-do it.
Thankfully, everything on my page lies within a template, so style-changes can happen very quickly and painlessly. Or so I like to think.
Anyways...while Annie's been mucking around with her web page this evening, looking for a job this past week and other such duties, what has Josiah been up to?
Well...on the evening of the 27th of June, I came upon the realization that the reason I started developing a mud at the end of last summer was so that I could play a game within the Star Wars D20 ruleset (I like it). With our friend planning on being a DM for standard DND, this kills my hopes for Star Wars this summer in reality, ahh, but in the virtual world, I can still get my Star Wars on. Unfortunately, no one has put together a D20 version of any MUD server, let alone Star Wars D20, so I'm going to have to do it myself. Ah well.
From the 28th to the 30th, I did a major re-write of what I wrote last summer, incorporating some nice design ideas and some of what I think are very clever hacks to make it work. Time will tell I suppose. I was able to incorporate 95% of what I had originally written, which is sweet.
From the 30th to the evening of the 2nd, I alternated between seeking a better editor for my language of choice (and what I'm writing the mud in), Python, and fixing and adding to the mud. I wanted an editor that would allow me to increase my productivity in coding by some non-trivial factor.
At 10:30PM on the 3rd, I started work. I decided that modifying someone else's bloated editor, or trying to spiff-up someone's little editor wasn't going to be enough. I had to build one from the bottom up with what I wanted. So I did.
Working until 3:30AM that first night, I had a mostly working editor, working enough so that I was willing to edit the editor in the editor. I had a known-good copy that was doing it's job on an older codebase, and the newer one I would open and test new features and old ones to make sure everything was spiffy. It was working GREAT. Over the course of the next morning (9:30-1PM), I put together some more features, made it better, cleaned it up.
After I got home at 3PM from class and discussion section, I again started work, adding more features, cleaning up more, removing bugs...By 10:30PM on the 3rd, that is, 24 hours later, I wrote what I consider to be a DAMN FINE editor for the languages it supports: Python, HTML, XML, C/C++. I know that the lexical analyzer that is included supports more languages, but I don't have color schemes for them. I'll add the menu items and support when I get color schemes for it.
So yeah. It currently is as fast (if not faster) than other programming editors currently available (except for emacs, which is damn fast, even though it is huge and a bitch to configure), and is at least as fast as other editors written in Python, including the standard editor, IDLE. I still have a few more features to add if it's really going to compete with IDLE, but it is all possible.
So yeah. If you feel like seeing a screenshot, head here. The menus are sparse because everything has a hot-key, but I'll be putting them in when I have time this weekend, hopefully to offer a release for anyone who wants it by Monday.
What I can't believe is that I put the thing together by hand from some random code fragments in the online tutorial, the demo files and some other places; IN 24 HOURS! Must be a new record or something.
Thank you Python, wxPython, and wxWindows. You have made my life better.
- web guy Josiah
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