Dear friends,

In this post, I do a particularly lossy review of my trip through time, from Monday May 6 to Sunday May 19, 2019.

First we talk about sleep, then a long part on technical tricks, then a slightly more backyard philosophical piece on human tool sharpening, and finally the announcement of a new academic event somewhere in the far or near or medium term future.

Sleep.

If you were one of the people who found themselves in my company for more than about 10 nanoseconds during the past weeks, I probably tried to get you to listen to the 6-hour long podcast between Peter Attia and Matthew Walker on the topic of sleep.

Usually I’m able to get something sufficiently out of my system by writing about here. I do this quite deliberately to try and spare my innocent bystanders.

This time, either it didn’t really help, or I underestimate how much I would have blabbed about it had I not let off some of the sleep steam here.

IN ANY CASE…

During the past weeks I have been paying more attention than usual to sleep, in terms of quality, quantity and consistency.

Because I also decided to take more notes than usual during the day, I could see quite acutely the effects of good sleep vs bad sleep on my performance and energy levels the next day.

If sleep was good the night before, my exercise the next day seemed to take much less effort, I still seemed to have more than enough energy at the end of the afternoon, and, most importantly, I had almost no trouble with that ever-important f-word:

FOCUS.

Conversely, if I let sleep-onset slip by as little as half an hour, my brain would be in three thousand pieces by three ‘o clock the next afternoon.

It is starting to dawn on me that all of those evenings where I tried to borrow an hour or even two from my sleep had a far greater cost the day after than I ever realised.

I can only conclude, that to experience the highest quality and intensity waking hours, one simply has no choice but to pay the full 33% sleep tax.

Damnit coffee.

Caffeine has a quarter life of 12 hours.

If you’re positively buzzing at 1PM, 25% of that caffeine is still active in your system at 1AM and absolutely will interfere with your sleep quality.

I have compromised by having my last shot before lunch, or in extreme cases right after.

TIL: Things I learned.

This WHV is one week late, because it seemed like nothing happened in the first week.

However, it seems I did learn quite few new technical tricks. In the subsections below, I share a selection of these with you.

remarkjs is great for quickly building technical presentations.

At my favourite local meetup, I was planning to give a talk on Hugo, the static website generator which is powering this site, and which I’m increasingly using instead of wordpress.

Because every new project is an opportunity to check and perhaps upgrade one’s tools (see below for how this can also sometimes backfire), I set aside the trusty reveal.js and ox-reveal Emacs orgmode interface I usually bust out, and paddled out onto rough internet seas, on the lookout for an alternative solution.

(Now that I think back, I had no good reason to search for an alternative, except that my pre-configured reveal.js style and formatting never made me really happy.)

Fortunately, after not too long I ran into remark, an HTML- and markdown-based presentation tool that seems simpler than reveal, but still quite attractive, as you’ll be able to see on the demo site above.

At this point, I was pleasantly surprised that this distraction had not cost more than about 30 minutes.

At least, that was the case until I ran into remark-mode for Emacs!

As you can see from the screenshot, this enables a pretty smooth generate-as-you-type workflow.

Also noteworthy, is the great built-in presenter mode. Press C to clone the window into a new linked presentation which you can move off to the external display, and then press P to switch to presenter mode where you can see all of the comments you have left in the markdown.

I made two small fixes in my own fork to enable seeding with your own HTML template, and to enable the generate-as-you-type to work also on straight .md files. I prefer keeping my presentations as .md (vs .remark) as most of the search logic I have built in Emacs assumes .org and .md files for my notes.

By choosing remarkjs instead of my existing revealjs workflow I did manage to exhaust the short block of time I had allocated to prepare for the talk, and so the talk morphed into a more spontaneous affair, dealing with orgmode, remarkjs and in the end, also a bit of hugo.

pybtex is a pure-Python bibtex parser and renderer.

One of the sites getting the wordpress-to-hugo upgrade treatment was my internet persona placeholder, the almost completely unknown charlbotha.com.

The upgrade of this tiny site would have gone quite easily, were it not for the fact that I was using the wordpress papercite plugin to publish a list of all of the publications, including fulltexts in most cases, that I’ve had the pleasure to be involved in over the years.

I could not find any tool which could give me exactly the sort of publication lists that papercite was able to.

To me it was clear that yet another tool was required. (“my god, it’s full of biases!”)

Fortunately, @stefanvdwalt very quickly pointed me at the Python package pybtex when he saw that I was careening off into the dark side with citation.js.

A few hours later I had built a script which was able to eat my Zotero-generated bibtex file and spit out different lists of publications with linked PDFs straight into a Hugo-edible markdown file.

See charlbotha.com/publications for the result.

P.S. Making it available to a broader audience is on my todo-list.

asciidoc is one of your best choices to write software manuals.

We are currently working hard towards the release of version 2.0 of our flagship FDA-certified cardiology product, TeleSensi.

Because updating the user manual with every release is not as fun as it could be, I had the idea to convert the doc-format source file to some text-based document authoring system.

Again, in spite of past positive experience writing manuals with reStructuredText and LaTeX, I made use of the opportunity to try out asciidoc.

In this case, I am happy to report that the choice of asciidoc ended up beating all of the alternatives by a mile.

I started by pandoc-ing the docx to asciidoc, and then manually (ha ha, it’s a joke we writers tell) fine-tuned the document until, in a few hours, the new manual looked significantly better than the original.

Long story short, our manual is now part of the software source repository and hence version-locked, it can be automatically built for new releases, and parts of the manual can be linked programmatically to form parts of our compliance documentation.

With the manual now essentially being a software construct, there are many more tricks we can do (and already do, but I’m not allowed to say much more).

You can build self-contained installers with legacy non-modular apps and recent modular Java.

In a rather surprising (to me) turn of events, I had to convert some legacy (read: non-modular) Java code from a product component to a self-contained installer on Windows and macOS so that our users never even have to think about JREs.

It’s possible that the following magical recipe could help you, should you ever find yourself in a similar predicament:

• Install AdoptOpenJDK 11 (LTS)
• Retrieve and extract this backport of the new javapackager from the yet to be released Java 13 into your OpenJDK 11.
• Build your legacy uber-JAR with the freshly installed OpenJDK11.
• Use jdeps to determine the list of modular dependencies of your uber-JAR.
• Armed with this knowledge, build a mini java-runtime using jlink.
• Now feed your uber-jar and the freshly created java-runtime to jpackager in order to construct a fully self-contained executable or platform-specific installation package.

Much, but not all, of that comes from this blog post.

You can easily dired-jump to the currently ivy-read’d file in Emacs.

I mix and match ivy and helm in my Emacs.

When you’re helming for a file, you can usually press F5 to open dired (Emacs’s built-in filemanager) on that file’s directory.

This is quite convenient, and something I was missing in ivy, which I use for example as part of find-file-in-project.

Weeeeell, by adding the following to your init.el:

;; for any ivy-read, press M-o to get action menu,
;; then 'd' to start dired with that file selected
(ivy-add-actions
 t ;; add for all types
 ;; (cdr x) gets the full filename, not just relative
 `(("d" ,(lambda (x) (dired-jump nil (cdr x))) "dired")
   ))

… you get to select d from the M-o action menu to dired-jump (a wonderful command by itself, usually bound to C-x C-j) to the currently focused file.

Sharpening these rocks.

All of that brings us to this.

I spent quite a few hours last week performing meta-work: That is, not doing the work itself, but rather sharpening the tools required to do that work.

As with all important matters, there’s an XKCD comic about this topic too:

Besides the mostly defensible tricks mentioned in the previous section, I did also invest hours in attempting to update the mobile and email-based parts of my personal knowledge management strategy (because Windows), but these hours led to a less than satisfactory solution.

If I have to be honest, it feels like those hours were wasted, although it was impossible to say beforehand that the effort to outcome ratio was going to be that bad.

(To make it all a bit more interesting, a few days later some of the dead-ends explored during those wasted hours led to coincidental improvements of other frequently occurring (on the order of 5 times per day) components of my workflow.)

Some folks double down on their workflows, rather taking the small hits and spending the time doing their actual work.

I find it difficult to resist an opportunity for streamlining.

Sometimes this pays off, not in the least because of the compounding effects of frequently applicable optimisations, and other times I fall down the rabbit hole.

In my dreams, I am able to reach a sort of workflow optimisation pinnacle, where all inefficiencies have been excised from the system. In reality, goal posts like to move it move it, and so the scramble never ends.

How do you approach this?

ICEMiRB

The International Conference on Emacs, Minimal Running and Blogging, or ICEMiRB, is a new meeting of minds and legs that the aforementioned and indomitable @stefanvdwalt and I are currently bouncing around.

I actually just want the t-shirt, but the more I think about this, the more I think it’s something that one day really has to happen.

Please let me know in the comments if you would be interested in taking part.

I imagine we will go all out in terms of the various forms of attendance and participation that we accommodate.

Have a beautiful week folks, I hope to see you again soon!

P.S.

@stefanvdwalt just reminded me that Mindfulness is to be the fourth main topic of the ICEMiRB.

Because the acronym is already of substantial girth (yes, we know that Mindfulness and Minimal could co-habit the same part of the acronym. coincidence?!), we will try to settle for one of two conference taglines:

ICEMiRB - A Mindful(TM) Conference.

or

ICEMiRB - The Mindfulness is silent.

or not.