• Safe European Home - The Clash
• My Corona - The Knack
• Germ Free Adolescence - X-Ray Spex
• Don't Stand So Close To Me - The Police
• Soul In Isolation - The Chameleons
• Ghost Town - The Specials
• Clampdown - The Clash
• You're A Germ - Wolf Alice
• Eat Yourself Fitter - The Fall
• All By Myself - Eric Carmen
• Waiting For The Man (with a vaccine) - Velvet Underground
• Paranoid - Black Sabbath
• Panic - The Smiths
• I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs
• Anarchy In The UK - Sex Pistols
• It's The End of The World (as we know it) - R.E.M.

Connor McDonald posts an excellent series of articles about tuning a database application.

This analysis from a end user perspective reminded me of my own experiences when I was a technical consultant helping customers running a large CRM application, typically in call centres scattered across Europe.

I was often summoned onsite and told to solve the problem that 'The application is slow'. Usually, different people were eager to give me their view on the issue:-

• Oracle DBA's often would be pouring over AWR reports or a monitoring tool and examining wait events in minute detail. 'We can see multiple ITL waits over 700 ms. This means we need to increase the FREELISTS for the ORDERS table but the business won't let us have an outage'.
• The application developers would also proffer their own diagnosis - 'Oh yes, we already know what causes that. It a custom workflow written by the previous integrator. It needs refactoring but it will take 3 months'.
• The CEO brusquely told me - 'This CRM application isn't fit for purpose. If this isn't resolved by Thursday, we're going to evaluate SAP and Safra will be hearing about this'.

Now, this is all detailed, technical analysis and background providing useful information to be considered but I would often ask to see the problem at first hand by talking to an individual who was using this application all day, every day to see the perspective from his point of view.

This simple request was often met with puzzlement and resistance by the technical team - 'Why do you want to watch a user ? We've already told you what the problem is. This will just waste time'.

Sometimes, this resistance was born out of a concern that the user feedback would unearth different, unrelated functional issues and distract me from the performance problems under investigation. Alternatively, a floor supervisor would air the valid concern that my conversation with an agent would distract him from dealing with the customer call. This was easily overcome by letting the agent handle the call with me simply watching and taking notes. Then, after the call was finished, we'd have our chat.

On one occasion, this approach of listening to the users proved particularly beneficial. The client was a utility company but could have easily been a bank or a telco. The business scenario in the busy call centre was typical. he, Essentially, the customer calls in with a query or complaint which is resolved by the agent.

Some call centres use CTI technology where the application looks up the customer from the inbound telephone number and then presents the customer details to the agent on the screen so he can start the dialogue, typically security checks.

However, this call center didn't use CTI so the agent had to manually search for the customer before the call could commence.

I watched the agent process an entire customer enquiry from start to finish and took notes.

The call started and after the initial exchange, the agent asked for customer's surname and started a search. In this example, the customer was Mr. Johnson. I watched with interest as the agent typed in 'J' into the customer tab and his 'Search'. This operation took a long time. There are 66 million people in the UK and 38 million of them appear in this client's database. Searching a table for all customers with a surname starting with 'J' is expensive performance wise.

The agent didn't seems phased or perturbed or even irritated as the hour glass popped up. He merely continued to clear security with the customer. By the time, this exchange was complete, the search had finally returned.

My eyes widened as the agent then proceeded to sort all these thousands of customers by surname and scrolled down page by page searching for 'Johnson'. Again, sorting a large data set like this is sub-optimal performance wise. This is an online application where users are expecting each button click to return within 3 seconds - not 3 minutes. The solution isn't for the DBA to increase the PGA to allow larger temporary segments to accommodate the massive sort operation. The solution is not to issue the request to sort thousands of records in the first place.

It would have been marvellous if the agent had uttered the immortal words 'Sorry, Mr. Johnson but the system is really slow today'. Unfortunately, he didn't but you can certainly envisage similar scenarios where this excuse is proffered.

When the agent finally identified 'Mr. David Johnson' of '23 New Street, Canterbury, CT2 6AD', the rest of the customer call went pretty quickly. It was either taking a payment, changing a tariff, lodging a complaint, a billing enquiry or a change of personal details and common to most agents working on that floor.

After the call ended, I asked the agent why he used that sequence of searches and scrolling to identify that specific customer. The answer, inevitably, was 'We always do it that way and when I joined, that's what Barry showed me...'

Then we revisited the call using a different technique. This time, I recommended he searched for the complete surname (he has that available as soon as the customer starts talking). When he searched for 'Johnson', the query ran much quicker but there are still probably thousands of people called 'Johnson' in the UK.

Instead of sorting and endlessly scrolling to locate the customer in question, I suggested he simply entered the postcode into the 'Address' section. The postcode is now known after the customer completed the security questions. He could have used customer number but that's a long 12 digit number with scope for error when entering it.

[ Ironically, one of his reasons for typing in 'J' instead of 'Johnson' was that 'Hey - I'm pretty lazy and that's a lot of typing' which resonated with me as that's normally my attitude. ]

The agent just needed to type the first element of the postcode ('CT2') to refine the search further and now we have the customer details on the screen in a fraction of the time it used to take him.

I thanked him for his time and told him it had been a very interesting exercise for me to see the application actually in use. He reciprocated and thanked me. As he went to put his headset back on, he smiled and said:-

'You're not going to tell my Supervisor about what we've just done, are you ?'

'Well, yes I am. Trying to solve these performance issues is why I've been asked to come in. Why do you say that ?'

'If Barry gets to hear about this, our call targets will probably be doubled !'.

He smiled and nodded at the electronic rolling ticker display detailing how many calls have been handled, how many are waiting, average call duration etc.

We all love pub quizzes and like TV quiz shows. I think it's partly because we are curious to see whether we can answer the questions and sometimes, to occasionally, laugh at some of the bizarre answers offered by contestants under time pressure.

One of my favourites recently was a lady who was asked:-

'Hydrocarbons are made up of carbon and which other element ?'

'Carbon dioxide'

I loved this answer because she replied, in part, with 'Carbon' which would have meant that hydrocarbons comprised of carbon, and well, more carbon. Then she added two atoms of oxygen for good measure.

Tipping Point is a very simple game; it's essentially the Penny Falls we all loved as children when we visited the amusement arcades at the seaside.

However, to tart it up a bit for TV, Tipping Point has introduced a load of silly phrases and words to make the game seem more exciting:-

• 'broad push' - when multiple counters fall and get pushed on the next level. These, in turn, get moved forward en masse to push more counters forward than a single counter could
• 'ghost drop' - when a counter takes a long time to fall, sometimes by lodging on a peg, so it takes longer to fall to the bottom.
• 'rider' - when a counter doesn't lay flat but lies over another counter, reducing its effectiveness.

This is probably the most common and irritating. We get contestants and the host, Ben Shephard, constantly urging 'Don't ride, don't ride, DON'T YOU DARE RIDE !' or 'OH NO ! DAVID ! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT - IT'S A RIDER'

• 'flat' - when a counter falls and just lies, err, flat so it's optimally positioned to be pushed onto other counters in an effort to move them too. 'JUST SETTLE FLAT. GO FLAT !'
• 'light up drop zone 3 please' - the contestant has a choice of four separate columns in which to place the counter. These are known as 'drop-zones' but it's incredibly irritating to constantly hear 'drop zone 3 please Ben' followed by 'drop zone 3 - light her up please'.
• 'ambient drop' - a rogue counter that falls, and may potentially dislodge more counters, but sadly when no contestant is active. Any fallen counters are declared null and void. Ben loves these rare events and almost screams orgasmically as he reiterates the rules to the disappointed contestant.
• 'rapid drop' - a counter that falls through the drop zone without hitting any pegs that disrupt or change its direction resulting in a fast, vertical drop.
• 'boomerang drop' - a counter that is dropped from one drop zone but miraculously is diverted (obeying the laws of physics) and ends its journey in an adjacent drop zone.
• 'lateral movement' - another common and incredibly irritating phrase. Used when the counter is simply going to do nothing of note other then fill an empty void. Ben immediately tries to dispel everyone's disappointment and boredom by fuelling a forlorn hope for some sideways motion and shrieking 'Janet, don't worry. We might get some lateral here', 'If we could just get some lateral, maybe the silver one will drop' or 'We could use some lateral here'.

Another element I find slightly irritating is the fake, forced bonhomie and camaraderie on the show. You are a contestant, competing for money against three other contestants, you don't know, on a TV game show. Please don't pretend you're all best friends and like each other by congratulating or otherwise commenting or providing lengthy, detailed Tipping Point analysis during other players' turns.

'Oh - marvellous drop, Peter. That's set you up very nicely indeed.'

'Oh - she's not being very kind to us today' (attempting to humanise the machine)

'Oh yes - well done Yvonne. You've capitalised on all my hard work there and won £450 but I don't care. Honest.'

'Oh - hard luck Brian. I can't believe that black one on the edge didn't fall.'

The best counter-example was a wonderful young man with a wispy, straggly beard (probably a student) who simply answered all his questions, frowned and silently cursed when he got a question wrong and barely reacted or smiled after a successful answer. He also grimaced, sighed inwardly and silently cursed when other contestants did well. He certainly didn't comment, praise, empathise with or interact with the other players. On the contrary, you could almost see him wince as other players luckily dislodged multiple counters to increase their total.

So that's why I hate 'Tipping Point'. Plus I have applied 79 times to go on the show and not been accepted.

7:54am on a quiet Monday morning. Quiet because it's New Years Eve. I have just put £15 into a hire car prior to returning the vehicle.

There's just one gentleman is in front of me paying. He has a fuel card so he's asked for his registration. He can't remember this so looks out to the forecourt to check. Maybe this is a hire car too although that seems unlikely as it's an ancient, brown, battered Volvo estate. No problem. Then he's asked for his mileage which he doesn't know. This is optional so no problem.

He leaves and I advance to pay my £15.02.

'Morning. I'm on Pump 8.'

Cashier hits a button and asks me 'Sorry, what pump did you say ?'

'Pump 8. £15.02'.

The cashier then spontaneously closes the till, grabs a high visibility jacket, mutters 'Sorry, Sir' and runs outside to the forecourt where the gentleman who just paid for petrol is slowly getting into the passenger seat of the Volvo.

I stand and watch the shutters slowly coming down as another member of staff refills this hot tray with pasties. I sigh inwardly as I realise what has happened. Still, no problem. I'm not in a hurry and those pasties do smell lovely.

The Volvo passenger slowly returns to the till.

The panting cashier removes his high-vis jacket and says:-

'Sir, you can either pay £5 or cancel the original transaction and start again'.

The gentleman looks puzzled and remarks in a manner eerily reminiscent of Roy Hodgson when he was hauled before the world's press and sporting media after England's defeat to Iceland.

'Sorry - dunno. I don't really know why I'm even here'.

I helpfully offer:-

'I think you've paid for my petrol instead of yours'.

'Oh - well I ain't got any cash so we'd gonna have to cancel and try again'.

The long, drawn out transaction is re-keyed. The man studiously avoids eye contact.

Finally, he has successfully managed to pay for petrol and a copy of the Sun newspaper.

As he finally declines his VAT receipt, he catches my eye as he turns to go.

'No problem, mate. Don't mention it'.

'Mention what ?'

'Well, you've delayed me for 5 minutes just because you paid for the wrong petrol pump'.

'Not my fault, mate, so nothing to say sorry for.'

So now, in this festive season filled with the spirit of goodwill to all men, this wasn't the best thing to say to me at 08:04 on a Monday morning.

All it needed was a quick, polite word on the way out.

'Sorry, mate. Bit early in the morning for me. Not had my morning coffee yet.'

Alternatively...

'Sorry, mate but I forgot to check the pump number. Happy New Year !'

Or even...

'Sorry mate, Dave normally pays but he's busy phoning the depot'.

But no, he couldn't just bring himself to mutter the word 'Sorry'.

Instead he points at the cashier and says:-

'Anyway, it was all his fucking fault'.

'Come on. You fill a car up with petrol. You're supposed to know the pump number or the amount.'

'I'm just the passenger. Dave asked me to pay.'

'Yeah - but look. There's your car and there's a massive NUMBER THREE above your petrol pump. It's not his job to monitor what pump you've used'.

'So what am I supposed to do ? Ask Dave how much I've put in ? Oh yeah - that'll work. Let's try that, shall we ?'

Then the man walks to the automatic doors and bellows to Dave. Amusingly, the automatic doors kept opening and closing on him which angered him even more.

'HOW MUCH FUCKING PETROL HAVE YOU PUT IN DAVE ? DAVE ! DAVE ! HOW MUCH DO I HAVE TO PAY ? DAVE - HOW MUCH FUCKING PETROL ?!'

And with that, he left and got into the passenger seat and Dave drove off.

The cashier then shrugged his shoulders and said 'Sorry' to me as I advanced to pay for my own petrol at pump 8 which totalled £15.02.

I then apologised to a rather perplexed and anxious looking lady for the delay as she purchased her last unleaded fuel of 2018 as the shutters were slowly raised again.

I tend to switch Linux distributions quite often. Consequently, I tend to have this process down to a fine art and it doesn't take me that long. The most time consuming element is ensuring the necessary backups are in place.

However, you normally find some package or configuration option you forgot about and my recent switch from Arch Linux to Fedora 29 and back again unearthed a strange problem with the Dovecot IMAP server I hadn't encountered before.

When I accessed my email, my automatic message filtering (using sieve) wasn't working so all messages ended up in INBOX. Worse, on every transfer, the messages were duplicated.

The logging revealed a strange error related to file permissions

$ journalctl | grep dovecot
Nov 29 08:45:32 <host> CROND[3356]: (andy) CMDOUT (msg 53/60 (12176 bytes),
delivery error (command dovecot-lda 3415 wrote to stderr: lda(andy,)
Error: net_connect_unix(/var/run/dovecot/stats-writer) failed:
Permission denied))

The permissions on this socket file were as follows:

$ ls -l /var/run/dovecot/stats-writer
srw-rw---- 1 root dovecot 0 Nov 29 08:52 /var/run/dovecot/stats-writer

Google revealed a couple of fixes. One was to simply change the permissions on the socket file to mode 777 which works for the duration of that session but the problem simply reappears after the next reboot.

Another, more promising avenue was to add a new section to '/etc/dovecot.conf'.

service stats {
   ...
}

I tried a couple of combinations which didn't work but then I went back to basics. I am processing my email as 'andy' but the dovecot processes are running as 'root' and' 'dovecot' (although they could be SETUID executables).

root      8276     1  0 11:45 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/dovecot -F
dovecot   8278  8276  0 11:45 ?        00:00:00 dovecot/anvil
root      8279  8276  0 11:45 ?        00:00:00 dovecot/log
root      8280  8276  0 11:45 ?        00:00:00 dovecot/config

However, I wondered if Local Delivery Agent (LDA) was somehow running as 'andy' (the error log implied this) which explained the permissions issue as the Linux user 'andy' isn't able to read that socket file.

Sure enough, the fix, inevitably, was a simple one-liner to add user 'andy' to the existing 'dovecot' group.

$ sudo usermod -a -G dovecot andy

Occasionally, I have to search lots of files for a pattern. It was only recently I discovered the wonderful silver searcher utility which saves me a lot of time.

To install 'ag' on Fedora, use the following (which isn't entirely obvious or intuitive if you're used to typing 'ag').

$ sudo dnf install the_silver_searcher

I believe there is an Emacs interface which would save me even more time.

$ time ag 'sql statement execute time' *.log
real    0m0.125s
user    0m0.128s
sys     0m0.257s

$ time find ~ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i 'sql statement execute time'
real    0m23.725s
user    0m7.965s
sys     0m1.618s

It all started innocuously enough with this post from Alex Shroeder

https://octodon.social/@kensanata/101052266709264418

Writing tools.
1. Emacs
2. Wiki
What about you ?

I spontaneously replied.

Emacs
Orgmode
Nikola

This reminded me that since, I had recently migrated my desktop from Arch Linux to Fedora 29, I needed to reinstall Nikola and check that the blog I never use still could be built successfully.

Oh - how exciting. Nikola has recently released version 8.0.1 and I was on the previous version - 7.8.15. I quickly created a Python 3 virtual environment and installed Nikola.

I generated my site as normal but encountered an error. One post failed to be processed correctly. This was strange so I created another virtual environment and tried using the tried and trusted Nikola 7.8.15 which I knew worked. Definitely.

Only, inevitably, Nikola 7.8.15 also failed. Oh well, a lot has changed since I last posted to my blog way back in January 2017. The version of Emacs has changed, the version of orgmode has changed. I examined the blog entry that was causing a problem. It was a fairly standard text article with a single source code block. As the source block was 'BASIC', the language wasn't explicitly specified. This isn't a problem in orgmode normally but the Nikola orgmode plugin got confused so I just pretended the code snippet was 'C' and everything worked again.

As I was researching the issue, I noticed that another static site generator, Hugo, had also added native orgmode support over a year ago. I had previously experimented with Hugo and found it was incredibly fast to generate my site - even when I added in my entire blog output (978 posts).

Clearly, there was no point whatsoever in experimenting with the Hugo orgmode support for a blog I never used any more. So I went ahead and did so anyway and found the Hugo orgmode support was pretty good. The orgmode headers were supported whereas Nikola used a comment section for the front matter.

Actually, there was a reason for this resurrected interest in maintaining a blog. After Google decided to pull the plug on Google Plus, I had ditched that platform in a fit of pique and experimented with Diaspora for longer form articles and Mastodon for microblogging.

The problem with Diaspora is that it doesn't currently federate with the ActivityPub protocol (which includes Mastodon sites) and the other problem is that, just like Google, it could disappear.

A Mastodon/Pleroma instance with no character limit might solve the problem but, to be honest, I prefer to read longer articles on a blog.

So I think there is still a place for a self-hosted blog, complete with an RSS feed.

What I have learned however is that blog migrations are still problematic and time-consuming. Even converting from a Markdown blog to another Markdown blog, the differences in the meta-data (categories, tags), inevitably no-one has though to standardise on a single, universal timestamp format and images (no matter where you locate them) are always a problem so there will always be some sort of migration effort required.

To guard against this, I have re-converted from orgmode to Markdown and my front-matter now consists solely of:-

---
title: "Another blog migration"
date: 2018-11-14T10:43:58Z
---

No categories, no tags, no author, no description, no keywords, no slugs, no comments.

Just words.

I was in a fog,
I didn't notice everything
Was coming all apart inside of me
There wasn't any way for anyone to settle in
You made a slow disaster out of me

There's a radiant darkness upon us
I don't want you to worry
I was careful but nothing is harmless
Baby, you better hurry

You were a kindness when I was a stranger
But I wouldn't ask for what I didn't need
Everything's weird and we're always in danger
Why would you shatter somebody like me?

It doesn't work that way
Wanting not to want you won't make it so
It doesn't work that way
Don't leave me here alone

I'll do what I can to be a confident wreck
Can't feel this way forever, I mean
There wasn't any way for anyone to settle in
You made a slow disaster out of me

There's a radiant darkness upon us
But I don't want you to worry
I was careful but nothing is harmless
Baby, you better hurry

You were a kindness when I was a stranger
But I wouldn't ask for what I didn't need
Everything's weird and we're always in danger
Why would you shatter somebody like me?

It doesn't work that way
Wanting not to want you won't make it so
It doesn't work that way
Don't leave me here alone
It doesn't work that way
Wanting not to want you won't make it so
It doesn't work that way
Don't leave me here alone

When I initially revisited Emacs, I used mu4e (instead of Thunderbird) for my email.

I used the wonderful Gmane service to read mailing lists in Gnus and Elfeed to read blogs and RSS feeds within Emacs.

This worked fine but after a while it became a little tiresome having to remember different key bindings to essentially perform the same repetitive tasks; reading messages, navigating (next/previous) messages, moving messages, saving messages, marking messages, deleting messages, searching messages, forwarding messages, replying to messages and occasionally composing brand new messages.

The solution was blindingly obvious. Just use Gnus for everything involving a 'message' instead of three separate packages. One set of key bindings to learn and master and Gnus has comprehensive functionality. Less is more.

Converting all my email processing to Gnus was easy enough to address as I previously used Gnus to handle my email and Gnus natively supports the maildir format.

Accessing mail was fast as I had already invested in establishing a Dovecot mail server and transferred messages from the corporate IMAP server to local Maildir directories (using getmail).

To replace Elfeed for reading RSS subscriptions, Gnus offers a nnrss back end but it was so slow and sequential, it was virtually unusable. Investigations revealed another option. Lars doesn't like anything that is slow and sequential so years ago, he created the Gwene (Gnus Web to Newsgroups) service which took any RSS or Atom feed and converted it to a pseudo newsgroup on the Gwene news server.

Gwene already carries a lot of popular blogs and feeds and if your esoteric favourite blog isn't present, you can simply add it and the content appears immediately.

I was about to celebrate and put the kettle on when, suddenly, unexpectedly and rather inconveniently, Lars decided to shutdown the freely available Gmane (and Gwene) services for understandable reasons (idiots launching DDOS attacks on the servers, threat of legal action).

I then researched alternative methods and experimented with a number of RSS to mail gateways. The best one was rss2leafnode which takes a list of blog subscriptions and periodically fed the content into a local NNTP news server - leafnode.

This solution worked well as I was now using Gnus to read email, mailing lists, newsgroups, blogs and RSS feeds.

Perfect - well almost. One of the advantages of mu4e (and notmuch) is the lightning fast search and powerful abilities. In Gnus, you are able to limit lists of articles by author, subject and marks and use IMAP search functionality.

However, I regularly used combinations of search terms and full text search on the message body. For example, display all messages from Peter to the 'Footy' mailing list in 2016 where he mentions 'Basingstoke'. In mu4e, this search is done using a query

'from:peter to:footy date:20160101..20161231 basingstoke'

I have always tended to use hierarchical directories and mail folders so my mail is archived by year. Gnus could also limit a search by author and full text search can be done using the 'nnir' engine so this type of search is possible in Gnus but unwieldly.

Combinations of multiple search terms were slightly more problematic but as I was already running a local mail server (Dovecot), I decided to use Solr to implement more flexible searching in my mail folders.

Occasionally, I want to search for a message and I have no clue who sent it or when so I need to search all email messages in all folders for 'cobain conspiracy'. This is easy in Thunderbird and I found the best way to achieve this was to create Dovecot virtual folders for 'All Mail' and 'Sent Mail' that spanned all messages regardless of date. Virtual folders can also be used to implement mu4e's built-in queries for 'Last 90 days'.

Why is Gnus unbelievably speedy ? Everything is local.

• No need for a direct IMAP connection.
• All email periodically delivered to local folders accessed via Dovecot.
• Message filtering and spam handling performed by Dovecot/Sieve prior to delivery.
• Solr maintains search indexes of email transparently.
• Mailing lists and RSS feeds updated automatically by Gmane/Gwene.
• Virtual folders automatically maintained by Dovecot.
• Gnus is simply the most fantastic piece of software.

My only reservations were that the number of Linux packages to be installed, configured and updated but thankfully, in September 2016, new owners stepped forward to resurrect the invaluable Gmane and Gwene services so I was able to dispense with Leafnode.

The only prolonged, expensive network access involved here is fetching articles from the Gmane and Gwene servers but this has proved so fast and reliable that I didn't need to pursue the option of mirroring this small number of feeds locally in leafnode (although, undoubtedly, that would have been an interesting and fun exercise).

birth

At the tantalising climax of the last episode, I was invited by Steve for a whistle-stop tour of Emacs.

Steve explained that the main reason he used Emacs was pure laziness. Naturally, this immediately got my attention. He explained:

'I'm lazy. It's not a fault. It's a fact. Most decent programmers are lazy. You're lazy'.

'Hang on, just a minute ! What do you mean - I'm lazy ?'

'Andy - you alias cd .. to 'up' and 'l' to ls -ltr. Just to save five characters typing. So don't tell me you're not lazy. Anyway, it's not a criticism'.

'I used to work just like you. xterm open. Edit some C code. Compile the code. Fix the compilation errors. Repeat. Or search for a string a set of files using grep. Identify the file of interest. Go to line 723. Edit the file. That's what most programmers do. But when you think about it, it's a very inefficient process. All that typing, all that mouse movement, all that context switching. You may think having multiple xterm windows open solves it but it doesn't'.

'In Emacs, we can do all of that processing within Emacs. Look.'

Steve then showed me the edit-compile-fix cycle in Emacs. This was fantastic. Edit the source code. Invoke make using M-x compile. Review the errors in a separate buffer. Hit the compilation error and you're immediately positioned on the offending line in the source file.

Similarly, for grep. Invoke search for 'parser' within all C and header files within Emacs. Then select the occurrence of interest and you're immediately taken to the source file at the right place. No more 'grep -n' and jotting down the line number.

The other biggest advantage Steve showed me was perhaps more basic and fundamental; simply the use of multiple buffers and 'C-x C-b' to manage the buffer list.

Previously, I would use multiple 'vi' sessions or ':n' to edit the next file in the list or toggle between two files using :e #. Worse, I thought that was advanced wizardry.

Steve also showed me the Emacs directory editor (dired) whch was impressive and a very quick way of navigating around the Unix file system.

childhood

And thus, my life using Emacs started in 1992. Initially, I was delighted enough with just this basic Emacs functionality as a great improvement over my previous approach.

However, I wasn't converted into an evangelist preacher from day one. I still used the 'elm' email client in a terminal window and 'rn' to read Usenet.

Also, I can admit this now. I would frequently fire up 'vi'; specifically for any global search and replace operations as it was just simpler and quicker than me trying to learn and master the Emacs equivalent.

Then I got moved to an OS/2 project but, Emacs was available for that now dead IBM platform so I copied my .emacs file and was happy.

Once, I got sent to Boston (America not Lincolnshire) to fix a tricky, long-standing problem. I was instructed to take the source code with me, given an open return ticket and was told to stay on-site until it was resolved. Fortunately, it transpired to be a one-liner involving a subtle race condition. Unfortunately, I fixed it on a Saturday and it was a public holiday weekend which meant I now had a lot of free time on my hands.

I remember sitting in the client's empty offices, revisiting the Emacs tutorial and really taking the time to read and understand it fully. I spent a lot of time experimenting and trying out all the features including stuff I never used, failed to understand or had simply forgotten about.

Even now, I still enjoy reading or watching Emacs tutorials to see how other people use it. Or maybe I'm just weird.

teenage years

In 1996, I took a job at Sequent who produced high end, expensive, fast, parallel processing, NUMA based Unix servers. Although I was now working in a Unix environment again, the DYNIX/ptx operating system wasn't the ideal development environment as a lot of my preferred tools, packages and utilities either weren't available or hopelessly out-dated and buggy.

However, the GNU C compiler was available so I embarked on building a lot of the GNU packages. This was a useful and instructive exercise as, occasionally, changes to the source code were needed to build cleanly - normally the addition of a #ifdef ptx macro.

Of course, inevitably there was a modicum of yak shaving involved here. For example, I had successfully built Emacs from source but it didn't interact properly with the brain-dead ptx version of 'grep'. So then I had to go and build grep which needed flex which needed...

honeymoon period

During this time, I was being slightly more inquisitive about extending my use of Emacs. I converted to ViewMail (VM) within Emacs to read my email and Gnus for reading Usenet news groups. I remember thinking that VM wasn't too far removed from 'elm' on an xterm.

I liked Gnus. A lot. I simply loved the Gnus manual which is undoubtedly the best software manual ever written. I was using adaptive scoring, threading and marks but still, I suspect I was (and am) merely scratching the surface of what Gnus is capable of.

I used the Insidious Big Brother Database (BBDB) as an address book for both VM and Gnus and I started to realise that 'ange-ftp' was much better than remotely logging into various Unix servers where 'vi' was the only option for editing files.

I discovered XEmacs looked prettier and had more packages available so I turned to that. Plus I liked Jamie Zawinski's style,.

Then I was forced to leave the comfort of my office based job, was given a Windows laptop and told to go and work in London on an Oracle data warehouse project. I might have done something awful or insulted my manager at the Christmas office party. I can't quite recall.

mid-life crisis

Naturally, Emacs on Windows was available but it wasn't like the real thing. Without a Unix environment, even Emacs couldn't mask the many deficiencies and limitations of using a Windows laptop as a, err, development environment although I later discovered Cygwin which eased the pain (just a little).

To compound the agony, I was now reading and writing a lot of documents in Microsoft Word and I needed to accept meeting invitations in Microsoft Outlook.

It was now 1999 and the dot com boom was well underway so I decided to join a small startup as an Oracle DBA/developer. This was a slightly unusual environment; well, in fact, there was no development environment. It was my job to create one without spending any money (if possible). That was great so we soon had Oracle databases running on Linux servers which doubled as our development machines.

This happy state of affairs lasted for four years until I moved on to a technical consultancy where I enjoyed some challenging work, troubleshooting tricky (and some trivial) problems at call centres located across Europe. My modus operandi now was (don't laugh here) was to make copious jottings in Notepad during meetings, phone calls and while I worked. When I returned home, I collated the notes into a lengthy Word document.

During this period, I talked to a lot of taxi drivers, visited a lot of sports bars and sat in countless anonymous airport lounges but I didn't even install Emacs, let alone celebrate of the arrival of a long-awaited package manager.

rejuvenation

In 2012, after some enforced sick leave, I returned to work and transferred to a role in product development. This was great because my enlightened employer allows me to use Linux on my work computer. OK - it's Oracle Linux and you may scoff - but it's Linux and I can run the latest version of Gnome, the email client of my choice and am able to install all my favourite packages. And still get support from IT.

Why - now I've got WebEx working and my enlightened colleagues use Wikis, I don't even have to fire up my contingency Windows Virtual Machine any more.

Bizarrely, history repeated itself and I found myself firing up a lot of terminal windows and multiple 'vi' sessions which was where this story originated.

Funnily enough, when I realised I was spending an increasing amount of time editing source code, I looked at what editors were out there. I looked at Sublime Text (commercial) and then at Atom (GitHub's excellent offering) which included many (over 5,000) plugins to support language formatting, colouring, compilation, search, ssh...

But wait, hang on a minute. I had invested a lot of time and acquired a lot of knowledge about a powerful text editor that could do all of this and more.

That's when I revisited Emacs. This time, I endeavoured to go even further and attempted to use Emacs for everything. Well, everything apart from a Web browser, SQL developer and LibreOffice.

Now I use the Prelude starter kit which is excellent coupled with the stylish monokai theme. I use Gnus and BBDB for email, news and RSS feeds. I use Python and the SQL modes extensively.

However, the biggest and most interesting addition to Emacs since my departure is the much lauded (and deservedly so) org-mode package. After a few false starts, I am now using org-mode for note taking, blogging, managing my calendar and ToDo's (my work and Google calendars are sync'ed using vdirsyncer). I recently ditched Pidgin in favour of the Emacs Jabber package.

Nirvana

Finally, I configured $EDITOR and alias'ed 'vi' as 'emacsclient'.