Red Echo

February 26, 2015

Renaming lindi

I wrote a little code editor some twenty-odd years ago which I named “lindi”, a partial acronym for some series of words I can no longer recall. I’ve long since lost track of the code as well as the meaning, but decided to reuse the name for my new retro-style terminal-mode IDE partly from nostalgia and partly because names are hard.

After a few months of steady use, however, I’ve noticed an unfortunate consequence of this particular name: it doesn’t autocomplete well, because there are too many other programs already named “lin*”. “lind”-tab is no shorter than “lindi”, so I end up typing the program’s full name every time I want to use it – which I do many times a day.

Being a fundamentally lazy person, I have therefore decided to rename my editor. I listed out all the unused two-letter prefixes on my system, then searched for various words beginning with those letters on github and the web to make sure they weren’t already used by other projects, and the winner is “ozette”, after the lake out on the Olympic Peninsula.

And now I’ve written a long blog post about an inconsequential design decision affecting a piece of software LITERALLY ZERO PEOPLE IN THE WORLD other than me have ever used! But I am amusing myself, and this is my blog, so I guess you know what you’re getting if you read it.

February 11, 2015

My sister Carolyn has a food blog, with recipes. Mmm.

February 10, 2015

It is now possible to build and run the .NET CLR on Mac OS X, from source. This is… interesting.

Cuwire is a styled-up replacement for the (extremely simple) Arduino IDE with more of the usual features found in a professional dev tool.

February 2, 2015

Silly architecture rant: the library

After doing my best to ignore the downtown Seattle library for the last decade, I am now stuck walking past it every work day. Everyone who has taken the time to figure out which side has the entrance tells me it is very nice once you go inside, but the building is so alienating that I just don’t want to. It looks like a group of extraterrestrial cephalopoids were busy erecting a high-tech prison when an earthquake knocked its foundations over, and they simply carried on stacking up the floors without bothering to fix the damage. The place is even more unwelcoming than the Darth Vader building, and that takes some doing.