Photo: Matt R.

Last night I finally got a full night's worth of sleep. That's the first time in about a week and I was really wearing out. The waking nightmares have been really strong since last weekend.

I don't think I've ever mentioned them on this site, but I frequently experience really strong and strange nightmares that often continue into half-waking sleepwalking nightmares.

It all started when I was about 8 or so. I became sick with a really high fever that took most of a week to break. During that fever, I experienced nearly constant hallucinations. I don't remember much in the way of specific details, but I do remember running screaming to my parents, deathly afraid of a giant beetle that I called "a Spanish bug" as well as being told that I was going to have to marry a purple kangaroo.

In retrospect, I'm really thankful that the experience happend when I was young, before I'd been exposed to more of the world. I suspect that if I went through the same fever today, I'd probably see much more extreme imagery instead.

Anyway, after I recovered, my waking hours went undisturbed. The nights, however, were filled with a strange sort of nightmare. Basically, it starts as a normal, dream-based nightmare. Then, I half wake up. The dream and the real world overlap and I get the ever so joyous experience of living the nightmare.

When I was younger, I had these nearly every night. And, most nights it was actually the same dream. There was a large, complicated bomb on the kitchen table and somehow it was my responsibility to disarm it or my family would be destroyed. I spent years of my childhood pacing the kitchen floor in the dark, staring at that bomb on the table.

By the time I was in high school, these waking nightmares had been reduced to maybe one a month and into adulthood they eventually disappeared for months at a time. At this point, they pretty much only show up when I'm stressed out.

Shelly loves to tell people about how she got to experience this when we were living in St. Paul. I was having an episode and was seeing an old woman, staring into our bedroom mirror. Not really threatening, but seriously creepy looking. That time, it apparently really freaked me out, because I screamed at the top of my lungs. If you've ever heard me speak in public, you know that I usually don't need a microphone to be heard. So, you can imagine what it was like to be in a small little bedroom when I unleashed a full volume scream.

She spent the next 5 minutes in confusion, trying to wake me up and get me fully into reality. Since then, she's pretty much figured out ways to cope with it.

That brings us to this week. I've been stressed out at work, Shelly's been gone, I'm trying to get caught up on financial paperwork, etc. It's just the normal stuff of life, but it clearly pushed my stress levels over the line.

Every night this week, I've half-awakened in the middle of the night absolutely convinced that there was someone hiding in our bedroom. And, when I couldn't find them, that they'd just escaped into the rest of the house. Only after searching most of the house did I wake up enough for my rational mind to take over and send me back to bed. A couple of the nights involved more than one episode and have generally left me exhausted every day this week.

Last night, however, I finally slept through the night. Here's to undisturbed sleep.

It's been about a year since I last changed the look of this site. In that time, I've also watched as something has gradually gone wrong with my Wordpress installation.

There's nothing particularly obvious about the flaws to the outside. However, when creating new posts, I get a completely blank screen. Remote content creation (via XMLRPC and API's) throws plenty of errors, turning on caching seems to render a blank page on nearly every other request, etc.

So, to remedy both situations, I've been building up a parallel installation. I'm putting the entire thing under version control to better be able to track stuff like this going wrong and be able to undo it. I'm putting an entirely new theme into place in that new installation, setting up all of the plugins and generally making sure that everything works properly in the other directory. The plan is to, on an early weekend morning after all is good, swap them out and have it go as smooth as butter.

For the new theme, I really didn't want to do it myself this time. So, I hired a design company I've used in the past. They are pretty cheap, but I've been happy in the past. And, since this is a personal site, I'm not exactly up for dropping a couple of thousand dollars on a design. At any rate, despite something like 8 or 9 sets of comps and quite a few rounds of redesigns, I'm still not happy with the results. I ended up signing off on something I thought I could live with.

But, as I moved to turn it into a Wordpress theme, I just couldn't get myself to like it. So, I started putting together another design of my own. However, before I put much more effort into it, I'd like to get some feedback. Click the image to see larger versions.

If any of you are better at design than I am, I'd love some help. This site is starting to become something and I'd like it to be pleasing to look at and reflect the level of effort I put into content and my personal brand. I'm just more of an amateur than a pro designer.

Photo: Joshua Davis

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I was giving Scite (and some accompanying scripts) a whirl to see if I could improve over my current default text editor: PSPad.

One of the features I use fairly heavily in PSPad and EditPlus before it is the ability to edit remote files. Both of those products edit remote files via FTP. As Scite doesn't have that feature out of the box, I went looking for a decent solution that would let me fill in that gap for Scite.

I knew of lots solutions for Linux (meaning I'd heard some random geek mention them at some random point) that allow any tool to treat remote files as though they were local, so I went looking for those first.

Since I was dealing with Linux, I figured that SSH was actually a likely method of delivery. That also afforded an opportunity to improve the security at the same time.

The aptly named "sshfs" (SSH filesystem) lets you mount any filesystem you can get to via SSH as though it were local. Wanting nice orderly instructions, I looked for the specific setup for Ubuntu and found this article that I'll be applying to my Ubuntu VMWare instance.

Next up was seeing if I could do the same thing on Windows. I saw lots of mentions of Novell's Netdrive. Most of them amounted to:

"Find some university that bought a site license, and mooch a copy off of an FTP server that they left publically open"

That, combined with the fact that past experiences with NetDrive have been less than stellar.

Mixed in with those results were mentions of WebDrive, which costs $55. It gets a lot of positive attention, but, as I'll likely be needing to apply this on at least 2 Windows workstations, possibly 3, that cost adds up quickly.

Then, I ran across SFTP Drive which, while still $39, also includes 3GB of storage on their servers and comes with a 6 weeek trial. So, I'm going to give that trial a spin.

So far, I'm impressed most with the speed and responsiveness. I'm used to SFTP being much slower than FTP in tools like Filezilla, so I wasn't expecting anything quick. However, it's pretty much as fast so far as any other network drive. I haven't tried it with anything really large, mostly just PHP scripts and properties files.

I think that this might be the solution that will work for me. Nearly every machine that I need to edit files on already runs SSH and the Windows machines that don't can be easily brought up to speed with this SFTP server.

Combine that with Hamachi VPN and I can lock down most of the firewalls and still edit the files I need from any of my workstations. Overall, a pretty good situation.

If marriage was strongly typed, then asking my wife what time she's going to be home would return a timestamp. Similarly, asking if she'll be home for dinner would return a boolean. However, since marriage is a loosely typed language, both questions usually return an array. In the array is a list of the things she has to do before she can come home.

To properly parse this response, you actually need to estimate the duration of each item on the list, total the estimates, tack on about 20% for overrun and factor in the commute. Only when you've run the response through this wrapper method can you actually get the timestamp you were looking for. And, if you were looking for a boolean, you need to then compare your timestamp against the timestamp for dinner and see which is greater.

So, in essence, having a good marriage is like working in a loosely typed language and you've just got to have really good exception handling. Once you've built up a good library of wrapper methods for how your spouse communicates, things can just cruise right along and work smoothly.

Or I guess you can throw an exception to be handled by the divorce() method. But that seems like a pretty bad approach.

I've been pretty happy with PSPad for quite a while as my text editor of choice. But, that doesn't stop me and nearly every programmer I know from looking at other options. That's because once you spend 8 hours a day in an application, typing in arcane syntax, trying to bend the computer to your will, you quickly find stuff you wish your editor would do and things that it does that bug you.

Human nature being what it is, looking for the more chlorophyl-enriched grass over there soon becomes the order of the day. So, when I saw the ever-lauded Textmate being used in a symfony screencast, I recruited Google to see if there's anything that can function equivalently on Windows or Linux.

Textmate only runs on a Mac and will pretty much always stay that way. The author doesn't have any desire to port it and I respect that choice. And, eventually, when Mac OS X is able to mix and match with my other VMWare compatible OS's, I'll be happy to have it as part of my arsenal. Until then, using Textmate carries a $500 startup penalty in the form of a new machine.

That doesn't mean that someone else hasn't taken the features, especially the whole "snippet" feature that lets you easily whip through complex code templates. If you watch that symfony admin screencast, you'll see how quickly he whips out the code, thus making that feature very desirable.

So, my searching for alternatives led me right to Textmate's author's site, where *he* was asking for what to tell people as alternatives on Win/Linux.

Most of that discussion was exactly what you'd expect. A couple of recommendations for vi, a few for things like EditPlus and even my current PSPad. However, almost none of the comments addressed what the author was looking for, which was something that does the stuff that Textmate does well.

One entry did address it and pointed to a set of scripts and properties files for Scite, including snippets. I was already ready to check it out, but he went one step further and provided *his* own screencast of his Scite changes, which had me grabbing the contents of his codebase.

I've used Scite a few times, but never took the time to look at the extension and scripting end of things, where it's now clear the real power lies. In addition to his snippet support, he also went with a nice Web 2.0 color scheme and a bunch of other features and configuration changes.

I'm still digging through the features and it's not a complete sell (I still really like live FTP editing and don't see a solution in Scite for that), but I'm definitely going to be using it to get some work done this week. That's the only kind of test that really helps you choose: using it for real.