Happy Easter. I'm sorry it's over. But I got to see most of the people that matter most, and got a good long talk with my mom out of it. Alas, now I have to try to get to bed at a decent hour so I can wake up and be rested for work tomorrow.

And a happy "self high five" day to lonely people!

High five day coincides with Hitler's birthday?

I made a debugger for my behavior tree library.

I'm proud of it. Was very easy to integrate, since the process method of each behavior tree node is wrapped in coroutine that yields when working, I was trivially able to insert a debug hook and yield until resume without breaking anything. Even nodes that normally don't yield just work.

It also handles remapping line numbers between MoonScript and Lua, which is nice.

{"name":"610862","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/2\/3237af673057737e4292fe2a719b117f.png","w":1286,"h":629,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/2\/3237af673057737e4292fe2a719b117f"}

Not the prettiest thing, but it seems to do the job just fine.

But damn, writing the GUI code is the most boring thing I've done in weeks. I hate two types of programming: GUI and web development.

GUI programming is frustrating because it's so much work for very little results. It's a lot of work to make a bad interface. A good interface is like impractical time investment.

Web programming is similar, but not nearly as bad. The hard part about Web programming is browser compatibility. The key there is doing everything server-side and avoiding JavaScript, which is the main culprit for incompatibility. There are stable and well supported libraries to provide a little bit of client-side convenience without breaking anyone's user experience.

There are definite advantages to Web development. I don't think many of us see it as their dream job, but it's a pretty reliable revenue stream. Most clients won't accept console programs, and GUIs are more expensive than Web is. And GUIs can suffer the same compatibility issues depending on supported platforms.

As for marijuana, I don't particularly hate the smell from a distance. I have a neighbour (or two?) that smoke it, presumably by prescription, and it doesn't really bother me to smell it occasionally. If it was 24/7 it might be different. Certainly it's more offputting when the guy sitting next to you in the office wreaks of it. I probably would be more tolerant if they shared!

The way I look at it is this: if the data involves graphics then a GUI is often desirable, albeit, it can still be a GUI designed for heavy keyboard use. The Web is a good candidate for a GUI. You can browse the Web in text, and good Web sites work fine in text, but graphics heavy sites are useless in text, and most poorly designed sites are too. A GUI just makes things easier in the modern Web.

Email, on the other hand, I actually prefer in text. Most email content is text, at least worthwhile content. Most of the graphics are just tracking beacons, or at best useless noise. Mutt, my preferred client, actually tends to do various things better too. It has better thread grouping than any GUI I've seen, it produces better outputs that are more accessible than most GUI and Web clients, and it supports things like PGP easily. If you haven't used a text client for mail give it a whirl. You might like it. It helps immensely if you have a good text-based text editor too.

Relatively easily. After you've composed the message in your editor and quit your editor you are returned to Mutt to view the metadata of the message. As I recall, you type 'a' to add an attachment and then have to type in the path. Or you can press '?' or tab to access a sort of text based file manager to browse for one. Mutt has been around for decades and was probably written, patched, used, and maintained by some of the godfathers of the Internet. It likely handles mail standards more correctly than most user agents.

Append:

Downloading them is relatively easily. I believe you type 'v' to view attached files and then select one as you would expect. If it's plain text or something that Mutt has been configured to know how to open it will just open normally in a view pane of Mutt (or run an external program as configured). Otherwise, you can indeed save it to a file so you can open it externally. I honestly don't deal with many attachments though so I'm not an attachment wizard.

If you are serious about trying out mutt, I must warn you that its configuration has been known to take lifetimes.

Regarding attachments: You can also add "Attach: /home/alex/reticulating_splines.wav" to the email header (if edit_headers is set). A file manager key binding for prepending "Attach: " to a path and copying the result to the system clipboard makes this very fast. Now that I think about it, a file manager could even have a binding that automatically places an "Attach: " string in a new email...

With both Mutt and Vim, I suggest you don't spend decades trying to figure out your ideal first config. Instead, Google for some examples and base your rc file on those. Look around for the things you want from a default config, but generally look for a beginner friendly config. Just get using the software and once you're comfortable you can worry about making it work the way you want it to.

Oh noes!

bamccaig is a beautiful person.

What the...? That's weird. I didn't even think that was possible.

I clicked the "Add Reply" button, but it didn't do anything the first time, so I clicked it again. My bad.

Edit: I edited the duplicate post so it's not a duplicate anymore.