BitWorking

I'm writing, not in seeking pity (well, a little pity wouldn't hurt), but as an explaination of why you may not have gotten a response from me for the past few months, or why if you did get a response it may have been weeks or even months in coming.

It all started three months ago when Lynne started having some health problems, which became a cancer scare, which it turns out she didn't have, but still ended up in her having two surgeries. In preparation for the first surgery she had an EKG and discovered she has an irregular heartbeat. Apparently the severity of an "irregular heartbeat" falls into one of two categories: 'really bad' or 'nothing much', and that can only be determined by a stress test, which she got done, but sitting around for a couple days wondering whether we were piling a heart condition on top of potential cancer was a bit stressful. Turns out that, like me, Lynne had an irregular EKG that falls into the 'nothing much' column. Lynne had her surgeries and both were successful, but surgery is surgery and it takes a while to recover. Also, between them I had my own pre-scheduled surgery and you heard how well that went. Oh, and during all of this we we're having problems with Reilly's elementary school teacher which finally culminated in us pulling him out to be home schooled.

After all that stress it was with great anticipation that we looked forward to our cruise the first week of December, and why it was with great distress that we found ourselves in the emergency room with Austin on Thanksgiving. He had come down with Influenza and gotten dehydrated, but an IV, tylenol, montrin, and a prescription for Tamiflu and he was doing much better and we were cleared by the doctor to go on our vacation.

When we finally got on the boat four days later Austin spiked a fever which we thought was the influenza, but it turns out he had pneumonia, which we didn't find out until we got back from cruise. While we were on the boat Christopher got food poisoning so we went to the ships doctor and the doctor promptly quarantined the family to our cabin for 36 hours, as a precaution in case it was Norovirus, but it wasn't, and the symptoms didn't match, but that didn't stop them from quarantining the whole family. When we got back home we took Austin back to the doctor and found that he had pneumonia, but not before he passed it on to Lynne. That landed Lynne in the emergency room when the first antibiotic they gave her didn't work on the pneumonia. Luckily the second one did and that helped to know which one worked when Christopher came down with pneumonia a few days later. The cruise, instead of being a relaxing break the previous three months of stress, was one of the most stressful things I've ever been through.

Oh yeah, no rest after we get back from 'vacation' either, we landed back in North Carolina on Sunday afternoon and I had to get up a 3:30am for a business trip to NYC the next day.

So, about those emails, bugs, action items, and lunch plans: I am behind, I am catching up, and thank you for your patience. Here's to hoping for a less eventful, or at least healthier, new year ahead!

I have, for reasons that will become obvious in a week or so, been looking at text editors and what happens when you save a file. For example, if we are editing the file filename.txt, different things will happen when you save the file depending on which editor you are using. VIM is fairly straight forward in that it renames the original file to filename.txt~, writes the modified contents to filename.txt, and then if that is successful deletes filename.txt~.

Emacs does roughly the same thing as VIM, but by default doesn't clean up the filename.txt~ file.

Eclipse is by far the simplest, truncating filename.txt to a length of 0 and then writing the new contents.

Gedit is by far the most byzantine, first it writes the contents of the modified buffer to a hidden file .gedit-save-NNNN, then it renames the original file to filename.txt~, then renames .gedit-save-NNN to filename.txt and finally deletes filename.txt~. What makes Gedit really stand out from other text editors is that if for some reason the filesystem doesn't support 'rename' then Gedit refuses to save the file, as opposed to VIM and Emacs which will just write new contents to filename.txt. As you can imagine that's controversial behavior and there's a long and painful bug thread on it, which is filled with all the painful things you'd expect it to be filled with, like claiming it's not a bug, or that the bug is in some other piece of software, or that it's not a problem under 'normal' usage, or that any other way of saving files is unsafe. Like I said, painful.

But I'm willing to believe there are even more complex cases, and if you know of an editor that has an even more convoluted save routine I'd be glad to hear about it.

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a really wide ranging book filled with lots of interesting ideas and musings, some on what a species that evolved in a gas giant would look and act like, how an interstellar civilization would operate, etc. The downside was that most of the aliens weren't very alien, you'd see larger differences between different groups of humans than what you saw between the differing alien races. A mix of anthropology, politics and old fashioned science fiction it was well paced and worth the time.

View all my reviews.