Sunday, December 28, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast plus V8 juice and leftover muffins from yesterday's lunch. Lunch: leftovers at home with Patrick. Today Patrick and I took a little hike to Corona Heights Park which sits atop a hill that overlooks the city. We'd never been there before, so it was nice to see the city from a new vantage point. Afterwards we had hot chocolate at a bakery/cafe called Urban Bread and we read from books—me from Steampunk and Patrick from The White Tiger. Home. Continued copyediting one of Patrick's books. Cow burgers and homemade fries for dinner at home. Dessert: two XOXO truffles. Throughout the day, I experimented with Eclipse. Here's what I did. Visited eclipse.org. Clicked the obvious Download link. Couldn't figure out which of the 8 Eclipse packages I needed. Spent several minutes Googling trying to figure out which one was correct. Downloaded Eclipse Classic, which made me feel not very special. Couldn't find the dmg file I thought I downloaded. Ah, it's not a dmg file—just a tarball that automatically unwrapped to a folder. Couldn't figure out how to install it. Guessed: I dragged the Eclipse folder into Applications. Ran Eclipse. Couldn't figure out how to make it do cool things with PHP. Searched Google on Eclipse and PHP, found some answers. Deleted the Eclipse folder. Downloaded, "installed," and ran Zend's version of Eclipse with PDT. Couldn't figure out how to configure an FTP connection. Searched Google on Eclipse and FTP, found some answers. Deleted Zend's version of Eclipse with PDT from the Applications folder. Downloaded, installed, and ran Aptana Studio. Configured 4 of my websites, so far so good. Figured out how to change a few settings. Edited a few files. Aptana seems pretty nice. Tried to figure out where the word wrap setting was. Searched Google on Aptana and wrap. Found this text on aptana.com: "Aptana Studio currently does not support word wrapping due to a limitation in the Eclipse framework. However, it is possible to access the text widget responsible for the display of text in the Aptana editors. Gaining access to this widget allows Eclipse Monkey to toggle the word wrap setting. Please note that there are known issues when word wrap is turned on." Uninstalled Aptana Studio. Deleted all my Aptana Studio workspace data. Given the progress described in STU-534, I think it's safe to say that Aptana will not have word wrap resolved and stable before January 2010, and probably later. Gave up on Eclipse and all Eclipse variants, at least for now. Very disappointing. The Time Machine backup I started last night got stuck, or rather, it was continuing very, very slowly—so slowly, in fact, that I determined that it was not working properly based on the speed of my connection (USB 2.0—480 Mbps) and the amount of data it needed to copy (about 200 GB). Worst case it should have taken a couple of hours, but it had already gone 24 and was stuck at about 16 GB. I canceled the backup, erased the Time Machine hard drive using Disk Utility, added more exclusions to Time Machine preferences, and set Time Machine preferences to use the newly formatted drive for backup. After about an hour it's already past 17 GB and continuing at a much faster rate than before. It should be done by the time I wake up.