I’m quite good at procrastination. I’d been meaning to clean up the conflicts between my development environment, production environment, and version control at work as well as create a system to backup all of my important data regularly. The operative words are had been meaning to. Last week my primary computer’s (the one that has all of my current work) hard-drive started making a knocking sound on my way back from work. At home the quick diagnosis was: nothing to be done – HD fried and all data lost. Even using dd to try a block based dump of parts of the filesystem failed.

So now I’ve been trying to patch things together from published sources – annoyed at myself for not making backups earlier. While most of my current projects weren’t harmed all that bad (a week or so of lost work), my archives of past projects and work was all completely lost. I thought I still had them on my secondary computer, but I remembered wrong. (Now who was the idiot who deleted them? Look between the keyboard and chair at the one writing this…)

Well, at least I managed to clean up my HD. And I really don’t think that I lost anything that important that I’d still need in binary format. All of my scientific papers (, theses) and teaching materials exist on paper if I need them in the future. At least HP’s service worked fast. I called them on a Thursday and on Monday morning when I went to work a new HD was waiting for me on my desk.

And I finally managed to synch the production environment and the version control data for the software I’m working on at work. And switch over to Subversion. Now on to recreate some of the graphics I’ve created…

I guess I don’t need to point out what everyone should learn from my experience ;)

It’s unbeliavable how a small task that requires a few days of work can stifle all creativity, ability to code, and even working on getting the troublesome task out of the way. In my case, anything that reeks of bureaucracy and text written to fill up space and look good gets me in a slump like this.

I’ve been battling with the final report of an EU project that we coordinated last year. It isn’t a large amount of data that needs to be collected, but much of it has to be filled in in several different forms and calculated in varying ways. It seems like a large pile of paper is required just to justify where the money has gone – no matter what the content. And since the deadline to return the final report is more than far away still, I just promised my boss that I’ll have it on his desk on monday for signing…

Maybe then I’ll be able to find the coveted flow again.

I finally decided to start working an application to add and search metadata (keywords, titles etc.) to images. Norman Walsh has provided a great initial framework with JpegRDF, which I’d like to create a GUI for. This might even end up being a part of my PhD work, or so one would hope. Since Java is what JpegRDF is programmed with I thought I’d dust off my Java skills and get the latest JDK 5 and start coding.

At the same time I remembered a piece by Tim Bray on NetBeans. If a guru of his stature plugs an IDE, it must be worth a try. After a few hours of fiddling around, I had a decent GUI in place with even some functionality working. I must say, for the first time in my life there’s an IDE that seems worth using. But please note, this is not a goodbye to Emacs, just goodbye as a Java development tool. NetBeans has worked well on my Linux laptop, a bit sluggish at times but I am continuously running short on memory…

I’m quite interesting in getting up to speed with the features that Java 5 brings with it. Almost three years of no Java development whatsoever has even the basics of Java hidden behind some cobwebs. But I do look forward to using Vectors of ints.

Also of note, last night on our way to the shower, I commented to Anna that it was nice to get back to some real programming. And then it dawned to me: what on earth have I been doing for the past year and a half at work. Over 10000 LOC of PHP which handles our personnel records, duty rosters, and salaries. That isn’t real programming? I guess the fact that there is no compiler still has me underappreaciating PHP at times, at least subconsiously. Bad me.