Resolutions for 2006
I've never written down my new year resolutions before, but I want to keep track of them this time, so here they are. I thing my friends already have sufficient ammo to embarrass me on a daily basis, but I want to make their life even easier, one year from now.
The first thing I want to do is to change my main text editor. I've been using vi and/or vim since 1991/92. I've used other editors briefly. LightEditor was one of them, in early 90's, written by two friends of mine, Ulisses and Oscar. But I quickly switched to vi/vim. I had a few months of experience with emacs, but I already had a operating system, I didn't need another one. So I stuck with vim for the last few years.
But times move on, and for the past year or so, my life with vim is more of a struggle to have decent utf-8 support with Terminal.app than anything else. It's probably my fault, but I think that in 2005, utf-8 support is something that should just work. It should be the default. Specially if you are using a Mac.
So after 14 years, I'm switching to a new editor. My choice was TextMate. I'll be posting my findings in the coming weeks. Changing editors, specially when the keyboard shortcuts are already hard-wired inside your fingers, is scary.
The second thing I'm doing is dumping all the PC-style Logitech keyboards I've been using during the last 4 years. I've used them successfully with my last choice of operating system, Linux, but with the Mac they where never a perfect fit. The Logitech drivers where not that good, and I had to switch mentally from a PC-style keyboard to a Mac-style keyboard whenever I used the laptop keyboard directly. Things only get worse if you take in account that I use a PT layout.
The third thing is to make a decent "About me"-page somewhere around here. It seems that some people want to contact me and don't know how. Can't blame them really.
The fourth and last one I intend to do is complete or share more projects. I tend to talk about things I want to write/do, start documenting and coding, and then nothing sees the light of day. It seems that I'm a starter and not a finisher. I would like to change that.
Some of the projects I would like to start and release in some form or another, are:
- Net::Protocol::XMPP: my 3 years old project to implement a Perl library for XMPP with reusable components, and without any network code;
- POF: POE++, a small layer of object-oriented perl around POE;
- a Catalyst-driven PSP community site for Portuguese people: members would be able to keep their own games list, and the system would facilitate trades between them;
- a sourceforge-like setup based on Trac for all the lisbon.pm.org mongers.
- gather on a single wiki/trac/something all my cookbook recipes that keep me sane every day: scripts, one-liners, tips and tricks, just write the damn things somewhere;
- Kiwi: my geek/programmer/terminal-oriented wiki/oo-database/cross-reference thingy;
- Cronofagius: a system to keep all those cron emails from flooding your inbox/cron-folder.
Small list, I know.
This last thing, the fact that I cannot finish what I start, bothers me. If you want a excellent example, in Portugal, of somebody who seems to be a do-er, look no further than Carlos. In the last year, he put together a great set of services. Kudos to him for that. Lets see if I can catch up next year…
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