Joss Posted February 21, 2013 Share Posted February 21, 2013 You get this kind of itch. It normally starts just at the back of the legs where you have been leaning way to far forward on you chair and are creasing up the fat layers where there really shouldn't be fat layers. Your toes, which by this stage are pointing backward towards the rest of the world, are getting cramped from being hooked round the bar of the chair in nervous expectation. In an attempt to pick up from where you last left reality, you shoot your legs forward, push your clasped hands in the air, arch your back and lean backwards. And it is in those few seconds of frozen time when, just a little too late, you remember you are sitting on a stool and crash in a reverse double flip that would make Tom Daley envious, into what is left of your life. "I'm fine!" You say rather too quickly, with the note of desperation from one who has a sneaking suspicion no one was listening anyway. It is time to scrape your eyes off your ultra-luminescent, super-flat, fake-sapphire encrusted, Rolls-Royce screen and find something more interesting to stare at. I have various illuminating buttons on my desktop. Not that they light up, but I have a whimsy that they may take me to a place that is more enlightening than whichever place I think I currently am; long experience has taught me the folly of believing with my own eyes for that is the fate of the unwary conspiracy theorist. BBC News. No, I already play politics on an assortment of blogs, many of which have gotten me into trouble; I do not feel the need of a top up. Lagoonia. Lagoonia? There is something about Google Chrome that encourages you to collect buttons that you have little interest in pressing. Wurm Online. Nope. When you compose music for something, it is always best to leave them to their own devices. It was the original home of Notch. I wonder if he misses it? ProcessSomething. Ah, that thing. Let’s go there! For some reason, the forums at ProcessWire appear to be a frequent destination at the moment. Apart from a place where kind people unstick me when I need unsticking, it is a place that I can be old in and no one gives a toss. Ah, another person who thinks ProcessWire would be better if it were Wordpress. I used to think that about various things. Luckily for the residents of ProcessWire-Ville, that idea wore off before I got here. I eventually kicked the ambition to death in the Joomla UI forums when I realised no one cared anyway. Anyway, lets give him an essay to ponder over. Ummm ….. flexible …. No theming system needed … easier than you think … I think I am beginning to repeat myself because I keep saying this sort of stuff. But then Soma keeps trying to teach me the same lesson over and over again, with only the vaguest inkling of success (I will get there, mate! I promise), so I am sure I am allowed my little mantra too. Okay, press send and do some more work. I have converted myself to Sublime Text of recent. God knows why, to be honest. In many ways it is little different to half a dozen other programmes I have kicking around on my PC. Prettier though, and of course uber trendy! (how does one type an umlaut?) Just to enhance the prettiness, I have downloaded a Dreamweaver theme for it from somewhere and made the background a fetching off white. Around 13 years ago I spent a whole year sitting next to a guru of a programmer who could write Perl slightly quicker than I am writing this. He was in love with systems like Emacs and Vim and always went for the Laura Croft White on Black colour scheming. He was a giant of a man who made me look thin. Anyway, he took an early version of PhpNuke and turned it into something not far off what Drumlapress is now. The Nuke designers had spent 6 months trying to integrate a forum. He did it in a morning. In one week he found over 600 security holes (every one of which was then ignored by the then designers). Anyway, I digress. It was coding hell – if you could have something called “Deep Coding,” this was it. It out Matrixed the Matrix, long before that tortuous trilogy was born. It was dark, foreboding, gruelling and scarily efficient. I once asked him for a shell script to run cron backups on a machine for 8 different databases, staggered and then farmed out to two external safe machines. The script came back before I had hit send on the email. I installed it and 10 years later it is still running. I swore to myself that I would never look at a black screen again unless it meant it was switched off. If I ever learned to code it would be bathed in warm sunlight on a tropical island of an office and washed over by peaceful waves of colour matched screen harmony. So when Dreamweaver introduced pinks and blues and greens to their colour schemes I was over the moon and have used them ever since on just about anything. The trouble is, I think I am turning into a soft version of that king of the slashdot hackers (he still thinks GW Bush is secretly running the US and Obama is a remote controlled android front). I have discovered that I am spending huge amounts of time getting the spacing in my code “just right,” and the indents subtly mirrored. I even sit back and examine my comments for purity, judge them for content and consider entering them for the Booker prize. But I knew it was time to take a break when in a final attempt to reconcile the world of coding to my genteel British background, my brain had gone south and secretly replace all the $ signs in my script with Pound signs. Mind you, they are worth more than dollars… perhaps I should hit run and see what happens…. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soma Posted February 21, 2013 Share Posted February 21, 2013 OMG my name is in there! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Philipp Posted February 21, 2013 Share Posted February 21, 2013 Take this ü with you. On german keyboards, it's a dedicated key beside [ENTER]. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joss Posted February 21, 2013 Author Share Posted February 21, 2013 Thanks! I will keep it the ü a draw for next time! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onjegolders Posted February 21, 2013 Share Posted February 21, 2013 Keep it coming! Made me chuckle heartily but think our American and European cousins will have trouble with some of the references. I especially liked the Tom Daley bit... Anyway, when's the book out? You can put me down for a copy or two... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diogo Posted February 21, 2013 Share Posted February 21, 2013 Great read Joss. it is a place that I can be old in and no one gives a toss In Portugal we have a saying that I hope still makes sense when translated: "old are the rags" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martijn Geerts Posted February 21, 2013 Share Posted February 21, 2013 for Jos, it's [ alt ] + [ u ] then press [ u ] if you're on mac Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joss Posted February 21, 2013 Author Share Posted February 21, 2013 Hey, I am a pianist, not a juggler! And the last Mac I had was a Mac II SE.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fenton Posted February 21, 2013 Share Posted February 21, 2013 got a spare ö laying around, fell free to use it 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joss Posted February 21, 2013 Author Share Posted February 21, 2013 ök Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diogo Posted February 22, 2013 Share Posted February 22, 2013 Here you'll find it for sure http://copypastecharacter.com/ I always use this site 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adrian Posted February 22, 2013 Share Posted February 22, 2013 Awesome resource diogo and so well implemented! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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