<p>I was trying to make Windows a little more Emacs-friendly (or was it the other way around?). First step was to enable the emacs server in my .emacs so I could make use of Emacs for quick and dirty editing tasks that require an editor better than Notepad but where the average Emacs startup time was just a little too long to make Emacs a viable alternative. A typical example would be to use Emacs as the editor for commit messages in Mercurial. A quick tweak of my global .hgrc provided me with…

<p>Happy New Year to all readers.</p>

<p>Long title, I know…</p>

<p>There, I’ve said it. No tiptoeing around.</p>

<p>Last night I did something I was adamant I wasn’t going to do, namely rooting my Android phone and installing CyanogenMod on it. Normally I don’t like messing with (smart)phones - they’re tools in the pipe wrench sense to me, they should hopefully not require much in the way of care & feeding apart from charging and the odd app or OS update. Of course, the odd OS update is can already be a problem as no official updates have been available for this phone (a Motorola…

<p>I generally don’t post that much about the tools I use as they’re pretty standard fare and most of the time, your success as a programmer depends more on your skills than on your tools. Mastery of your tools <em>will</em> make you a better software engineer, but if you put the tools first, you end up with the cart before the horse.</p>

<p>After all the brouhaha over Visual Studio 2012 not being able to build executables for Windows XP, it looks like Microsoft has reconsidered:</p>

<p>… make sure that you have removed all dependencies on the project that you are about to remove before you remove the project from the solution.</p>

<p>There is a lot that modern IDEs do well, but uncluttered writing space isn’t one of them. Once you add the various views of your project, the debug window, the source control window and various other important panes you’re left with a tiny viewport into your code. The visual clutter can be disabled of course, but you’ll get it back sooner or later. When you switch back to debug mode or build mode, for example.</p>

<p>Quick update to the previous post - it looks like at least some of the videos from GoingNative 2012 are now <a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012">available on the Channel9 page</a>.</p>