Which

I haven’t posted in a while. It’s not that I’ve been busy or anything. I’m in the waning years of my education and thankfully, I pushed myself enough during my first four years that I only need to scrape by now. It’s one of those things where you stop for a little while and it’s just hard to get the little engine churning again. I resigned from the idea of blogging regularly, but I still have an itch now and then. Very often, I think of something whacky to write about but I’m afraid to blog because people I talk to in real life would have already heard the story. And trust me, there is no worse way to ruin a joke than to repeat it to someone.

But, I remembered that I have two or three readers that I don’t actually interact with and they are missing out on my amazing adventures. This is mostly their fault for not finding a way to tune into my life. Still, it’s not fair for them to continue on without this basic joy in life. I guess all along, that has been the primary purpose of this blog. Life and happiness.

This quarter, I’ve been working on stripping down my development environment. Part of this is due to the split time of developing on my Macbook Pro and my desktop. I like having a farily uniform environment in both and so I’ve been trying to stick to the standard subset of Unix that they both share. It’s neat how productive you can be with these set of tools that have more or less been around forever. All sorts of programs try to convince you that they make you productive in one way or another, but in the end, I’ve found that I work quite efficiently with just bash and vim.

Another thing that has led to my productivity is the use of the variable which. I used to spend time thinking about a variable name to use when I’m selected an index into an array. index just felt wrong, and boy, is it wrong!