First, our techniques of estimating are poorly developed. More seriously, they reflect an unvoiced assumption which is quite un-true, i.e., that all will go well.

Second, our estimating techniques fallaciously confuse effort with progress, hiding the assumption that men and months are interchangeable.

Third, because we are uncertain of our estimates, software managers often lack the courteous stubbornness of Antoine’s chef.

Fourth, schedule progress is poorly monitored. Techniques proven and routine in other engineering disciplines are considered radical innovations in software engineering.

Fifth, when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse. More fire requires more gasoline, and thus begins a regenerative cycle which ends in disaster.

The company I’m currently working at has this habit of adding personpower to projects. We’ve been hiring since I joined. I don’t know what to think when I read these.

In Android, one needs to put unit test files in the app/src/test/*module-name* directory. I spent a few hours yesterday writing tests to check that the conversion between visenc and Unicode is correct in Android. After those hours, however, I learned that NDK support for tests is limited, and the error I received means that I need to write instrumentation tests instead, which use an emulator or a real device.

Instrumentation tests are user tests that check whether the user-facing aspects of the app run correctly. Unit tests, instead, check whether data flow, calculations, etc., are working as expected. The former is slow; it needs to be run in an emulator and should mimic user behavior. Just checking whether e converted correctly to ا should not require an emulator.

It’s hard to tell for those who use their editors with mouse clicks on pretty icons, but once you catch this virus called doing everything from the keyboard, it becomes attached to your digital (from digitus, finger) psyche, making it impossible to leave behind. I even purchased an Android keyboard for my phablet just to ssh to my home and write with Emacs. Consider that!

Today I stumbled upon several posts regarding favorite Emacs packages and wanted to list mine.

org-mode

I’m not writing this in org-mode because I observed that I can detail, micro-revise, and lose focus while writing because of its extensive functionality. Instead, I’m using Zsh’s vared to enter lines to an org-file when I write first drafts. But editing, keeping, following, creating plots, literate programming—doing everything that can be done with text—is possible in org-mode.

I have F11 bound to org-capture and F12 to org-agenda-list. F9 F9 stores links wherever I like, and I can use C-c C-l in org buffers to paste them.

w3m

When I want to search Google but don’t like the idea of running a huge browser session just to look up an answer on StackOverflow, I use this.

undo-tree

It shows the versions created by undo/redo of a buffer in a tree format. Emacs’s default undo may be cumbersome at times, but this package is terrific.

wc-mode

To count words in a file. When I forget this package, I use C-x h M-| wc as a substitute.

auctex

Once upon a time, this mode led me to migrate from LyX to LaTeX itself.

ESS

Emacs Speaks Statistics is an R frontend. I’m not using it daily, but it’s much better than the R command-line client.

Uniquify

Makes buffer names unique. If you have files with identical names, this is much better than having names like myfile.txt<1>, myfile.txt<2>, etc.

recentf-mode

A list of recent files.

smex

ido for M-x. Standard M-x selects commands by their prefix; with smex, you can filter them by any substring. This makes a difference for those with poor memory.

ahg

I use Mercurial more than Git, and ahg-mode seems like a good alternative to standard vc- commands.

projectile

It considers directories under version control as projects and defines functions like find-file, multi-occur, and recentf for them. It’s a very simple and non-intrusive way to have project management.

elpy

For Python programming, elpy provides completion and much more functionality.

ack-and-a-half

An ack mode, a hybrid version of the other two.

xgtags

A GNU Global mode for C++ code tagging.

• If you host multiple sites, only one of them (the default) should have the listen 80 directive with the default_server parameter. The rest are defined by their server_name directives.
• Debian’s default configuration file comes with Unix socket definitions for php-fpm. If you prefer to have Nginx connect via a TCP port, you must update the configuration to use port directives.

I began using mutt after Gnus on Emacs. The reason I left Gnus behind is that it was incompatible with offlineimap and slow for IMAP use. I see no point in installing a local IMAP server when the tool that should work with Maildirs does not work. I don’t know the situation with Gnus nowadays, but I think it was a good decision to use mutt.

However, recently, in Emacs circles, I saw that people are talking about mu4e as a search-based email client. Almost all my development life is under Emacs, and I’m using org-mode for non-development more and more. Using email links with mutt and org requires ugly hacks, and I don’t like ugly hacks. So I wasn’t able to use links to email messages in org-mode with mutt. (They weren’t vital as my previous TODO scheme was based on email and I still keep it for archiving on notes in the cloud.)

I decided to give mu4e a go. It seems to work with offlineimap without fuss, and Debian packages are available. And unlike some other email packages, Emacs support is one of the important parts.

I have more than a single email account, and offlineimap reads these to different mailfolders. Since I wasn’t thinking of combining these email messages, these were residing in different Maildirs. I used mu4e for several days on only one of these. As mu updates its index by checking only the newest messages, (I think) it’s not straightforward to adapt it to different Maildirs.

Then, I saw a post that puts all Maildirs into a single directory and gives this mail root to mu as the indexing directory. Ah, nice idea. I should have thought of this.

But I was too lazy to update my offlineimap configuration. First I tried to put symlinks in a directory and supply this to mu, but it didn’t work. It doesn’t follow symlinks and as far as I can tell, there is no option to ask it to do so.

Then I moved my Maildirs to a directory and created symlinks for offlineimap and mutt in my $HOME. Symlinks are my friend. Pity for those whose OS doesn’t give an easy way to use them.

I turned off JavaScript (the best JS is dead JS), enabled ad blocking, and customized keyboard shortcuts (changing Ctrl-F to Ctrl-S as in Emacs). It loads noticeably faster, and I can’t even tell how many tabs are open while using other applications.

If you’re using Linux, it’s likely in your distribution’s repository. If you’re on Windows, the Midori home page provides both installable and portable packages.