Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

What text editor do you use?

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Once more, I’ve been thinking about that one thing that regularly prevents geeks like us from sleeping peacefully: What is the text editor that I prefer?

I’ve always been a vim guy. I think I started using it on my Amiga or something about 15 years ago. I used it daily when I was studying in France and ever since. Of course, I’ve read a lot about how Emacs can help one reach nirvana and I’ve tried it a number of times but I’ve never managed to like it. I’ve even aliased vi to emacs for some time but this didn’t help a lot…

As a Mac user, I’ve bought TextMate which lots of people consider as being one of the best text editors around. In fact, it is regularly described as a 21st century Emacs. It looks great and has lots of very cool features. It supports loads of different programming languages and is extensible through plugins.

Even though I use it from time to time (especially when editing Ruby programs), I tend to quickly open a terminal and launch vim far more regularly. I wonder if I should alias vim to TextMate to help me recover my financial investment :-)

When programming in Java, I always use Eclipse. I know, it’s massive and complex but I love the syntax completion and refactoring facilities. I tried NetBeans but I am more of an Eclipse guy.

What about you?

Steve Jobs has flair…

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According to Apple, one million of iPhones 3G have been sold during its first week-end! I don’t remember any other expensive technology product being as successful as the iPhone 3G in its first week-end.

I can only conclude (like countless have done before me) that Steve Jobs has flair.

I need one.

My Contribution to Art

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When I was 19-20 (i.e. more or less the same age as my current students) I started composing music and the result was my first ever album released in 1995 pompously entitled “My Contribution to Art” featuring the following tracks:

Interestingly (for me at least…), “My Contribution to Art”  is a concept album which tells the story of a boy (let’s call him A. before you ask) who meets a girl (call her A.), falls in love, gets dumped and only finds happiness again when he meets another girl (call her C.)

I have to be frank, some of the songs are crap but, what the heck, they are mine and I spent hours working on them. I composed the tracks using my old Amiga 500 running Bars & Pipes Pro and my trusty Kawai Kawai K4 synthesizer from 1993 to 1995. I was lucky to have saved them in MIDI file format and I managed to easily import them in Logic Express on my MacBook this week-end. I was delighted to be able to record them in pristine 24-bit audio quality directly from my still-living Kawai K4 and apply some mastering polish.

I am now a proud artist with two albums, My Contribution to Art and So Logical (released in 2004), both available as free downloads as well as free streaming on last.fm.

You’ll notice that neither album has a cover yet. Maybe someone can come up with interesting (and appropriate) covers for the two albums? I don’t mind people using my photos on Flickr. I’ll invite the “winner” for lunch in a nice restaurant…