Welcome

Welcome to our family website, a look into the lives of the Walker-Smith family, well thats the idea

To find out more about us read the whoweare page, to find out more about this site have a look at the colophon... hmm which doesn't yet exist

This site as it stands at present looks excellent on Mac, with Sarari, Netscape7.1, and Mozilla Firebird0.7, and now IE. If it looks bad in your browser, either buy a Mac or upgrade to the latest browsers!

This is a work in progress, I hope to turn the whole site over to this look and feel over the next few days, so this site may not be working 100%, esp in those pesky window browsers.

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Why not use 3-cards a new service brought to you from walkersmith.net

Reviewed

• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• Hybrids, Robert J Sawyer
• Havana, Stephen Hunter
• The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind
• Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Cloud of Sparrows, Takashi Matsuoka
• The Teeth of the Tiger, Tom Clancy
• The Last Samurai
• Time's Eye, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
• Ilium, Dan Simmons
• Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• Film: Just Married
• book: Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson
• book: Bios, Robert Charles Wilson
• book: Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke
• book: A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch
• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• book: Red Thunder, by John Varley
• Film: Kill Bill
• book: Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
• book: Colony, by Rob Grant
• book: Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson
• Film: 28 days later
• Film: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
• book: Pale Horse Coming, Stephen Hunter
• Films: three good ones
• book: Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• book: Humans, Robert J Sawyer
• book: The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
• Film: Terminator 3
• book: Blue Horizon, by Wilber Smith
• book: Evolution, by Stephen Baxter
• book: The Physics of Consciousness
• Matrix Reloaded: Theory

Words

• minutia
• Perfidy
• Necromancer
• ephemeral
• bete noire
• etymology
• heliopause
• agitprop
• entr'acte
• allegory
• ameliorate

Recent Entries

• We're Londoners
• book: James Bond in the Man with a Red Tattoo, Raymond Benson
• Indy at six… months
• Its a bit unnerving...
• Hybrids, Robert J Sawyer
• Havana, Stephen Hunter
• The Jimny, bought July 1999 – sold June 2004
• Hmm Apple Juice
• Options
• The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• Uncle Toms Fotos
• My many faces
• Mass Destruction
• Being left by ...
• minutia
• Daddy, where have you been all this time?
• Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind
• Certified Geek
• Green Delight
• Perfidy

Archives

• August 2004 (1)
• July 2004 (2)
• June 2004 (7)
• May 2004 (7)
• April 2004 (5)
• March 2004 (9)
• February 2004 (17)
• January 2004 (24)
• December 2003 (21)
• November 2003 (15)
• October 2003 (20)
• September 2003 (25)
• August 2003 (15)
• July 2003 (32)
• June 2003 (51)
• May 2003 (12)

Text Editors

Whats your favourite? Which do you use over and over again? Writing this right now I am using the Open Windows built in text editor, called descriptivley "Text Editor", its so plain and simple, its quite the elegant text editor ever. I suppose really I feel a certain amount of nostalgia for this editor, it was the first one I used to write real programmes on. Right now I am ufsdumping 1 disk to another whilst writing this, I am in my computer room at work, a place that is bloody cold right now, outside is the desert sun, unceasing. And well I just happened to be using one of my only Suns that had a monitor attached, and I just knocked up a quick program to dump this disk to another, but have to wait here to press yes every so often for the ufsrestore command, perhaps it has a flag to say yes, I will need to read the man page. Hence the time to write this, if my boss is reading!

On my desk I use my own iBook, with of course Mac OS X. My favourite editor here is BBEdit. A little more function bloated than this Text Editor I am using at the moment. However, on the mac so far its my favourite.

Its has a few features I really like, color coding the code you are writing and such. However one feature I feel it is missing and for the price you pay for it it should really have it, and that is variable substituion. When I am writing perl and I want to write $color_scheme_red variable, it should allow me tab, or right mouse click and pick the variable I want. I see this in the Windows world with the Visual Basic app a work collegue uses. I hope this sometimes gets put into the app sooner or later.

However on comparison between this Text Editor and BBEdit I would say the bells and whisltes only make is marginally a better editor, half the stuff I don't need, or am not sure how to.

Then there is vi. When I started the above mentioned job, the first one, with this editor, they introduced me to vi, I could not get my head around it. It seemed to be so stupid. I said I would never learn to use it. Day to day this could be my most used editor now, especially working as a SysAdmin. Its so powerful, and works on any *NIX machine more or less the same way. That was some piece of great design.

Only another file system left to dump, but its a big one; 1.3Gb. Think I will go and show my face in the control room and see if all my users are happy.