http://norman.walsh.name/2006/04/20/thinkpadDS 9 44 2006-04-20T17:43:07-04:00 $Date: 2006-04-20 18:34:26 -0400 (Thu, 20 Apr 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh Thoughts on NetBeans, the virtues of a dual-screen setup, and waking up early. I've been using NetBeans pretty regularly for a couple of weeks now, hacking away on an implementation of XProc. I feel a little guilty about using NetBeans instead of Emacs for Java development, but I console myself with the thought that Java development is a pretty specialized task and I routinely use tools other than Emacs when the job is specialized enough (IM or IRC, for example). On the other hand, it's software development and that's what Emacs is for, so I'm conflicted. Hey, maybe NetBeans is just that good, ok? Anyway, one of the things that becomes immediately obvious when you start using an IDE like NetBeans is that you don't have enough screen real estate. I can fit an Emacs and three shell windows side-by-side, but NetBeans takes the whole screen. Switching between desktops or raising and lowering NetBeans or the browser to read documentation (or Emacs to edit stuff) was just too painful. To combat this, I went back to what I learned recently and now I have two displays. NetBeans goes in the top and my “normal” desktop, an Emacs, three shell windows, and a browser goes in the bottom. Very nice. Well worth the effort of figuring out how to do it. On most of my other desktops, I just use the “top half”, though I'm starting to find things drift into the “extra space” in other places.

As long as we're talking about fiddling with the machine and increased productivity, let me pass along another trick. I recently learned that I can use /proc/acpi/alarm to control my laptop's sleep state. That is, instead of sleeping (suspend to RAM) until I wake it up, I can program it to wake up automatically. If you're like me, when your machine starts in the morning, it spends a good ten minutes or so groveling through the several hundred spam and virus emails that were sent overnight. And sometimes it does other stuff like rebuilding local databases. The practical result is that for the first ten or fifteen minutes of my day, when I'm fresh and raring to go, the machine c r a w l s through every task, CPU pinned by all the background tasks. Well, with a quick shell script, I now put my machine to bed at night such that it wakes up an hour before I do and gets through all those tasks before I even get out of bed. Very nice. Well worth the effort of figuring out how to do it.