Monday, November 19, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Reimbursements paperwork. Self study work. Handled a request for 24/7 access to the library at Mission Bay. Computer maintenance for the shared office laptop: Installed 1 GB of spare SO-DIMM, Windows Updates, installed Leopard. Helped student JM with disappearing e-mails. Lunch at desk: salad and soup and fresh fruit from the cafeteria. Leopard Active Directory joining and Parallels network issues with the shared laptop. Downloaded and installed Panic Coda 1.0.5. The trial version runs for 14 days, and the price is $79. I admit Coda is a very elegant application, but its disappointing weakness is its editor. There are a lot of things I like about Coda. Many tools I need are in one place. For most people it will be very simple to set up. It knows what I need—e.g., I love the upload permissions defaults dialog. It's fast at uploading. However, there appear to be very few default keyboard shortcuts and no way for me to create my own. I will try to find out if there are ways to get these keyboard shortcuts, but I have low expectations about that because OS X itself is not very keyboard accessible and Coda is an OS X-only application. Unless there's something huge I'm missing, I feel that any productivity I gain from Coda is lost when trying to write code. For example, in HTML-Kit, when my cursor is sitting on an angle bracketed element (tag), I press Ctrl+T and the entire tag is selected. Coda appears to have no way to do this. In HTML-Kit, while the cursor is on a tag, I can press Ctrl+Alt+Home and the contents of the tag is selected. Again, Coda appears to have no way to do this. In HTML-Kit, I can create a macro so that pressing a keyboard shortcut spits out a commonly used string of text. Coda appears to have no way to do this. In Coda, there appears to be no way to switch between the various views—editor, terminal, etc.—using only the keyboard. Syntax color highlighting was difficult to set up; I couldn't get it to behave exactly the way I wanted. Maybe TextMate will be a better option for me. Set up a limited admin account for Eric. Password management. Active Directory administration. Restored Retrospect config65.dat file from backup because it disappeared again (second time now). For some reason Mozy didn't back up the version I needed, so I used Retrospect to restore its own configuration file. During the restore I wondered if it had an idea that it was doing brain surgery on itself. I'm storing a copy of the config65.dat on my usb drive from now on because I can't afford to lose that file. Eric and I had a telephone meeting with Susie. Helped Joel with a laptop setup emergency. Dinner at home with Patrick: green pepper cow with steamed rice.