SkierX

Freaks and Geeks

skierx — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 01:50:01 +0000

I just watched the first and only season of Freaks and Geeks. This show is the type of embarrassing funny. It sometimes makes you wince. It also has an amazing soundtrack from the period (early 80s) and before. The Who, the Grateful Dead, Kansas and tons of others.

Dreams From My Father; Origins, thus far

skierx — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:45:48 +0000

So I bought Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. I’m about halfway through the first section now, entitled “Origins”. Observations:

The book was published 12 years ago.
Barack was 33 when it was published and he is now 45.
He was born in Hawaii and later moved to Indonesia.
Barack’s full name is Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.
Barack Sr. was from Kenya. He died when Barack was 21.
Barack’s mother, Ann, was from Kansas. She died just after the book came out.
Barack Sr. married Ann then later left when when Barack was two.
Barack’s mother remarried an Indonesian man, Lolo. He also died when Barack was young.
Barack has a half-sister, Maya.

So far the book is an enjoyable and informative read. I like how much empathy Mr. Obama possesses. It really is apparent when he is describing his parents life before he is born.

Bitstream Vera

skierx — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:26:32 +0000

Want a good, free, open-source font for writing code with? Try Bistream Vera Sans Mono.

Windows Web Development Workflow

skierx — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 22:59:08 +0000

Here is how I set up my web development workflow. As this first figure illustrate, you start with an initial Subversion (or CVS) repository. You then checkout (1) a working copy of the repository to any development severs you want to work on as well as the production server.

You then proceed to make changes and develop your site. When you want to share your changes with the rest of the other developers (or if you want to get ready to push the site to production) proceed as follows. In the second figure, step (2) is where you update your local copy. This will make sure the files you are working with are as current as possible. After you update, you can then commit (3) the changes. Committing will upload your changes to the repository. Continue repeating steps (2) and (3) throughout the site development and maintenance.

Whenever you wish to push a version of the site to the production server, you can run an update command and freshen the files.

Reverse Color (and other effects) in Emacs for Windows

skierx — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 04:03:44 +0000

The Process

If you run emacs on Windows, there are a number of customizations available to our Unix counterparts via their .Xdefaults file. We have access to these same customizations, however we manipulate them via the Windows Registry.

Start regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs to make changes for all users). Create “Keys” (folders) as necessary.
Add a “String Value”. Name it Emacs.x; where x is one of:
background, bitmapIcon, borderColor, borderWidth, cursorColor, font, foreground, geometry, iconName, internalBorder, lineSpacing, menuBar, toolBar, minibuffer, paneFont, pointerColor, reverseVideo, screenGamma, selectionFont, synchronous, title, verticalScrollBars.

My preferences

1. Emacs.reverseVideo = On 2. Emacs.font = -outline-Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-normal-r-normal-normal-12-90-96-96-c-*-iso8859-1

Switches to light on dark background (which is default console behavior).
Changes the font to a more readable mono-spaced font.

SkierX

skierx — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:59:49 +0000

Hi, I’m SkierX, also known as Josh King. I’ve been using this alias online for about a decade now. The name initially was a derivative of RacerX from Speed Racer. I was into skiing, so I adopted SkierX. The first place I used it was an online game called SubSpace. I think ex-skier would be more appropriate now because I rarely get to go skiing anymore. For as long as I’ve been using this name, people have been mispronouncing it as sky-er instead of skee-er.