Abhi Yerra

I’ve been reading the Pragmatic Programmer and it says to choose an editor and stick with it. Even though recently I’ve been using EMACS, I’ve decided to choose vim. There is a reason, mostly being that EMACS seems a great way to get carpol tunnel. So I’m going to try to learn vim better.

Also vim is small so it should be better to edit files in it as opposed to EMACS which tries to be too many things. Although I like the lisp interaction in emacs it just seems that vim would be a better editor for my needs. I can learn the other tools to work on.

I’ve been using EMACS because it allows me the ability to indent, but I’ve been missing the main point of writing stuff fast. This is a major reason I decided to switch. Anyways it’s an editor. If in the process I find that I like emacs more and more then I’ll switch back, otherwise I’m sticking to vim for now.

Today I went to the the Berkeley Zen Center and it was a mixed experience. Since I am more of a follower of Theravadan School it seemed a little unusual in how they do their ritual. Although, the little things stay the same like worshiping the Buddha the layers around it seemed to be a little wierd to me. I may be biased with my whole focus being toward Theravada as taught by Ajahn Brahm.

But a Buddhist Sangha is better then no Sangha so make the best out of what is there. So on to the main point of this article which is the Eightfold Path and what I thing about them as referring to my life.

Right View – In my life this is realizing that there is something missing. That whatever happiness that I try to achieve that it doesn’t last. It all too soon fades away or the happiness that I once had turns into the mundane. These being worldy things that never really make me happy for a long time. Discovering the Dharma and the teachings of the Buddha it was a major milestone as it showed me that it doesn’t matter how much I have we’re all going to die so make the best of what I already have and will have until the day I die that is myself, my mind. Make this happy and everything else will follow.

Right Thought – This one I have trouble with all the time since I get gruesome thoughts that just come up which are not appropriate, or thoughts that are not quite right. However, I know these thoughts come up to everyone, I just have to be able to work with them. I have to train myself! I can’t wish for the killing of someone and mean it. I may say it as humor in a conversation with my friends, but I never mean it.

Right Speech – This is simple, try not to say anything harmful or hurts another and actually mean it. When I am with my friends I say things like “You should be shot!” or curse words, but when I say them I always laugh and never mean it. I don’t mean anything bad to happen to them.

Right Action – Doing what is right that is following the five precepts. I try to do the best following these. I got the last one mostly covered. Except for a few instances, but the other 4 I have to dilegently work on.

Right Livelihood – Skillful Livelihood vs Unskillful Livelihood as Ajahn Brahm put it. I will try to do best to do my trade. So as a student I will try to be all that I can be as a student.

Right Effort – When I meditate I will try to put all the effort I can into it.

Right Concentration – This I have to develop.

Right Mindfulness – This I have to develop.

So I’ve decided to install FreeBSD as one of my operating systems instead of Linux. I made this choice after deciding for a while on which *nix to stick to. Knowing me I might switch back to Linux or even have it installed on a seperate partition later on, but for now I am sticking with FreeBSD. Let me tell you why.

• FreeBSD is not chaotic. That is when I install a base FreeBSD system I know what’s going to be there and I know that it works most of the time.
• I get pretty new packages through the Ports system. I liked Ubuntu, but it was just so damn inconvienient to wait 6 months or more for up to date packages. I mean they do have Backports, but still why do I have to wait 6 months for Firefox 1.5?
• I find that even though all the hype is behind Linux that FreeBSD has a pretty sweet system that is pretty nice and easy to use.
• I like UNIX instead of lets fight Windows.
• Debian was cool, but not enough control of the system. I like to chance stuff so I like playing around with system config files. This is great with FreeBSD.

Well that’s about it. I don’t think I organized them in any way, I might even have repeated some of them, but those are the reasons I prefer FreeBSD.

So I am starting to use emacs quite a lot. However, I hate the default emacs coding style which is the GNU style. So I want to convert say code that looks like GNU to K&R. Well this is how one would go about doing this.

M-x c-set-style k&r
M-x mark-whole-buffer
M-x c-indent-line-or-region

Update: The problem with this is say you want the K&R style if’s where you have:

if(statement) {
stuff;
} else {
stuff;
}

This is not possible in this method. You will get:

if(statement)
{
stuff;
}
else
{
stuff;
}

Well I decided to write a Ajax application. This crazy md5 ajax application is taking me on the way to the world of Web 2.0 development. Also started working on a Project Management Web App for like small projects of mine called lunchen, doing this instead of using something like trac because I want to create an application and I am also going include a lot of Ajaxy type stuff in it. It’s still under development as I’m having fun with it and just playing around with it in general. The Subversion Repository is up with recent commits. All of these applications are using web.py which is an awesome library.

Also another awesome application is in the planning stage for the UC Berkeley crowd will talk about it in a future post.