screen is the Best Thing Ever

I love GNU screen. It’s a great feeling to be able to start work on my desktop, then maybe go to the couch and do some more, or even work from home for a day and pick up exactly where I left off.

It’s been especially good this past week when I was build engineer for Blogger. I could be assured that even if I closed my laptop, or lost connectivity, or was forced to restart by a system update, a build or push would continue and I could re-connect with the associated shell whenever I wanted to.

Get started: GNU Screen by Jonathan McPherson

More tips: MacOSXHints article

My advice:

1. Automatically start screen in your bashrc. Otherwise, the term you want to connect to will always be the one you forgot to start screen in.
2. Give your screen sessions names. I have a key shortcut in my window manager that pops up a box for me to type a name in, and it will open a terminal with that screen session in it (creating it if necessary). It’s much easier to connect to “CodeReview” than “16092.pts-4.lukey.”
3. Likewise, I have a script on my laptop that takes a session name on the command line and sshs and brings up that screen instance in one step.

Pills for Procrastination?

I had to read Joe Clark’s rant a few times before I could come up with the right response.

Procrastination doesn’t seem to me to be on the same scale as mental disorders. I think of it as more of a bad habit.

While I don’t much go in for whizzy systems, I do appreciate GTD for its two principals:

1. Write down everything you want to get accomplished
2. Only focus on the next thing you need to do in the steps to getting something accomplished

By being disciplined about managing my commitments, I can lower the barrier to productivity. Reading blogs is a hell of a lot easier than learning to drive, but if I'm faced with the choice between pressing J and finding the number of a local driving school, I’m more likely to do the right thing, productivity-wise.

Getting Things Done helps me think in the right terms to overcome my natural procrastination.

Getting Getting Things Done Done

Merlin revisits Kinkless GTD, a GTD system build on OmniOutliner Pro. (Kinkless GTD)

It’s something I’m curious about, but I’m not sure I’d ever use it. I often feel that when I’m at home I shy away from my laptop.

This weekend I’m busting out the Visor and I’m going to try doing things up David Allen–style.

Windows Vista Requiring Well-Formed Feeds

Oh, thank God. Yes, this is blatant disregard of Postell’s Law, but one of the beauties of XML is that you can assume away parsing. Once a big player gets permissive, feeds get sloppy, everyone has to special case their parsing, and you get HTML.

Plus, the only people who have to get it right are the blogging tools. And Zeldman. And we’re all of us smart people.

(Another great tool that assumes away parsing: LISP. And that enables macros, which are useful.)

[via Niall Kennedy]

More reading: Dave Winer has a good essay on the subject, even if it hints at a Brent-Simmons-wants-to-make-feed-reading-hard conspiracy to dominate the market.

We Fixed the Back Button!

There are certainly more interesting things in the latest build of Blogger, but one subtle one that I’m happy about is that we fixed back button behavior on the posting page.

So now, if a publish goes awry, or for some other reason you clicked off the posting page, you can hit “back” and everything should be the way you left it.

Interestingly, the fix was different for IE and Firefox. The problem with IE was that we were setting no cache headers on the posting page, so IE would do a reload when you went back to it, restoring the form to its server-pristine state.

Firefox wouldn’t reload, but our JavaScript page creation was confusing its saved form state, so it wouldn’t restore the text right. Now we have even more JavaScript that pushes the contents of textareas around to placate Firefox’s caching.

I can’t find a reference after a few minutes searching, so I’ll describe the issue: Blogger generates the edit post page with a textarea that is either empty (for a new post) or has the saved post (for editing an old post). The rich text editor boxes (EditHtml and Compose) are created dynamically with JavaScript, using the contents of the textarea for their initial value. Since Firefox bases its form state caching on the order of elements at page-load time, the rich editor boxes haven’t been created yet when Firefox is restoring values, and therefore cannot have their state restored. Instead, they load as normal and base their contents on that textarea, but, since you never edited that textarea, it still has the value it originally got from the server.

Our new strategy is to copy the contents from the rich editor boxes back into the textarea as you navigate away from the edit post page. That way, the textarea gets restored correctly when the page loads, and the rich editor boxes are built using the cached post instead of what originally came from the server.

Not sure how Firefox 1.5 will deal with this, given its new caching.

Update: Back button doesn’t work in Safari, which caches the state of the page, and it inadvertently broke posting for Opera. Sorry guys! Fix is on the way.

Update 2: As of 11/11, Opera should be working again, as well as the back button in Safari.