Emacs and a new beginning

Some fun Emacs stuff:

• A nice tutorial on creating your own language mode. One of these days I'll get around to setting up something that indents SQL the way I want it.
• Multi-tty Emacs. From the description: "Emacs is notoriously slow at startup, so most people use another editor or emacsclient for quick editing jobs from the console. Unfortunately, emacsclient was very awkward to use, because it did not support opening a new Emacs frame on the current virtual console. Now, with multi-tty support, it can do that. (Emacsclient starts up faster than vi!)" Must get me some of that. (Hey, I wonder if there's a way to forward the emacs client/server thing over SSH…emacsclient at the remote end, emacs here. Yeah, you could do it with Tramp or some such, but this'd be neat. Hm…)

I had a meeting with my boss at work last week (before a nice four-day weekend…the split schedule I've got means that sort of thing happens very rarely. But I digress) to set my priorities now that the upgrade has more or less been finished (lingering issues aside; see ahead).

One of the big things is getting Zimbra set up. This will be nice; we do not have a calendar for the office right now, and this is is getting to be a pain. My boss is open to the idea of something that's not Outlook/Exchange, and that's good.

The other thing is getting a bunch more Windows machines in. This is a small shop, so "a bunch" means another 15 or 20 -- which'll double the number we have. I'm not entirely happy about that, but because this is a longer-term project I've been given time to do this right. And to me, "right" means "using open-source tools whenever possible to manage Windows". Thus, I'll be getting the time to set up Unattended and wpkg, and possibly even digging up Windflower and seeing if it's worth continuing. I'm actually kind of excited about this.

It's a little strange having a manager take this much of a hand in setting priorities; I've worked in a series of small shops and, up 'til now, have been left more or less on my own nearly the whole time. It does feel good to get a bit of direction, though. I mean, I know what needs to be done and I'm doing it, but I've always felt a bit lost trying to decide what's most important for everyone once past the finger-in-the-dike stage.

Now to go try and get Multi-TTY working on this laptop…

Ack: Just realized I never described the lingering problems with Solaris 10. Fairly simple to describe: LDAP lookups take 'way longer than they should (ls -l /home/ can take 5 seconds per line sometimes), and JDS on the SunRays is slower in parts than it should be (click on the logout button, wait 60 seconds, message pops up saying "Are you shure you want to log out?"). I'm hopeful I can track those down without too much effort…