I Love Emacs

I bought a new laptop last week, and when migrating my data over from the old one, I did realize that information vital to manage my stuff (like time and money and projects and stuff) is scattered around in so many places (Outlook, plain text files, ToDoList, AceMoney, various timesheets in Excel, etc) that it's starting to look unprofessional. :-)
I must admit that I was content with AceMoney, but my project/time-tracking system was what bothered me:
- Use a ToDoList to decompose my projects to a tree of tasks.
- Track my project-time in a Word table (I know it's cheesy, but Word let's you enter current time very quick)
- Cross-reference ToDoList's autogenerated ID's with Word's table
- Report with a little WinForms program, using AntiWord to extract the Word table.
Boy, there's a whole lot of dependencies there, and a whole lot of clumsyness, but well, that's what I got used to.
And that's all past now, because I've found out about Emacs's Org Mode and I'm the happiest person alive to do organize *ALL* my stuff and clock my time with it.

Plus, becoming the Emacs-enthusiast I always only hoped I would become, I'm even migrating my personal accounting from AceMoney to Ledger which has an Emacs mode.

I must say again, that I was content with AceMoney itself, and I think it's a very handy and clean application. For personal finance, it's far better I my book than jGnash or GnuCash, BUT Ledger is the ultimate lean-and-mean solution for you if you live by "less dependencies and more openness the better"-code. And I think you should.

Jython StringTemplate un(shallow)copyable

I've started porting to Jython a Python application, which uses the Python version of StringTemplate. Right after the start I've bumped into an error when using StringTemplateGroup.
The Python code looks like this:

def go():
   g = stringtemplate.StringTemplateGroup("A","B")
   g.getInstanceOf("A_TEMPLATE")

When calling go() from Java/Jython, the following exception is raised:

Exception in thread "main" Traceback (innermost last):
  ...
  ...
  File "C:\DEV\stringtemplate3\groups.py", line 363, in getInstanceOf
  File "C:\DEV\stringtemplate3\templates.py", line 391, in getInstanceOf
  File "C:\DEV\stringtemplate3\templates.py", line 369, in dup
  File "C:\DEV\jython2.2.1\Lib\copy.py", line 78, in copy
Error: un(shallow)copyable object of type 

Others have bumped into this error too. It's because Jython doesn't fully implement object copying (in the same sense that CPython doesn't implement it fully -- you cannot just copy arbitraty C objects). It turns out, that this isn't a problem for me, because as soon as I've changed the StringTemplateGroup error listener to my own (copyable) listener, the problem went away.

But there's one caveat. I actually choose to NOT use any custom error listener, because console errors are okay for me, so I've tried and put errors=None in the StringTemplateGroup constructor, which is a no-no, because None means "use the default one", which is exactly what I didn't want right now.

So the final solution was to redefine go like so:

def go():
   g = stringtemplate.StringTemplateGroup("A","B")
   g.errorListener = None
   g.getInstanceOf("A_TEMPLATE")

Works like a charm, so far.

Know (not) One Editor

I've just started to read the original Pragmatic Programmer book (talk about late-adopting, when did it just came out? last decade??) and there truly is some clever stuff therein. But the nitpicker I am, I've immedieately found something I don't really agree with: the One Editor Tip (#22) The authors say they think is better to know one editor very well, and use it for all editing tasks, which I personally don't think is too clever. At least for me. Because you already know that I Love Emacs, you should also know that every tool has it's place and I don't really want to give up Eclipse's or Visual Studio's services so well tailored to Java/C#. Pragmatic Programmer comes up with this very contrived example, where they indicate that being able to alphabetically sort import statements automatically is a major programmer productivity booster. Give me a break. Use Emacs to organizer your life but use a Java IDE that understands your code, refactors it, generates stubs for you, and such.

Of course I'm just totally mean here, because back in '99 Eclipse and VS weren't even conceived. What I really wanted to point out was, that the more advanced technology becomes, the more specialized knowledge you have to embrace. Back in the days, you were wicked cool with Emacs as an IDE. Nowadays you should switch if you want to avoid unneeded complexity when working with enterprise(y) stuff. And you better know some nano/joe/vi cause it's damn sure not all of your clients will have emacs installed on their machine you have to quickfix *now*