Modify this registry key:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JetBrains\Resharper\v7.1\vs11.0]
"IsSuspended"="True"
I usually setup this registry before running automated tests against Visual Studio, so R# doesn’t interrupt my tests. It also makes debugging VS (in case you’re an extension developer) quite fast 
The UI way of setting this up is via Options -> Resharper -> Suspend (in Visual Studio Options, not Resharper options).
We talked a while ago about not looking for existing solutions; instead ponder over a problem for few days, bring out your independent thinking, your creativity and (at the least, if you decide to look for solution) a perspective to appreciate the solutions/implementations. Overall it’s an exercise in thinking – creating value, not merely consuming it.
William Deresiewicz, in his address (Solitude and leadership, October 2009) to plebe class at Westpoint Military Academy (spoiler alert, this is where you go and read the essay in entirety ), brings up a crucial perspective to thinking: that of a Leader. (Emphasis in the quotes are mine)
…what makes him a thinker—and a leader—is precisely that he is able to think things through for himself. And because he can, he has the confidence, the courage, to argue for his ideas even when they aren’t popular. Even when they don’t please his superiors. Courage: there is physical courage, which you all possess in abundance, and then there is another kind of courage, moral courage, the courage to stand up for what you believe.
Sit over the idea. Get your thinking hat on!
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise.
… You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
… Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality.
How not to do it?
Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else
Later in the article, he puts forth the importance of Solitude. Please read it. Let me wind up with a dialogue from Peaceful Warrior, 2006 (amazing movie, watch it!).
Socrates: Everyone wants to tell you what to do and what’s good for you. They don’t want you to find your own answers, they want you to believe theirs.
Dan Millman: Let me guess, and you want me to believe yours.
Socrates: No, I want you to stop gathering information from the outside and start gathering it from the inside.
Photo credit: Thinking by Sidereal, on Flickr
During the shower, you had an awesome idea, what if you know; I could just speak out code instead of typing 
With all the world’s information a click away, you immediately type away the keywords. Since you’re awesome and have done this for half decade now, within minutes you find a couple of research papers and an implementation on Github. Next task: grok through the papers, download and try out the implementation. Well, the papers lead to more papers (it’s a tree, the dependency hell we all have come across 
). The tool may create value for you, feature requests, bugs and patches for the implementation.
So far so good. Couple of days later, you have a good understanding of the method proposed in the paper. You have a rough idea of the pros/cons. Only of that particular method or implementation. Unconsciously your world is now limited to that particular process. Or god forbid, you probably gave up the idea based on (your premature understanding of) someone else’s judgement.
The unfair part – you didn’t give your grey matter a chance at solving the vanilla problem. You robbed yourself of the pleasure of creative process. And who knows, the world lost a significant breakthrough because you were biased :-/
Don’t look at existing implementations!
At least until you understand the problem deeply (to reach there, you need to scratch your head enough to have potential solutions ) and the challenges surrounding it. This will help evaluate existing solutions with greater clarity. You will know what separates your proposed thought/solution from other solutions. You will develop your thought, contribute to other implementation. World will be a better place. Even if you may end up with something which somebody else already did, the awesomeness of creating that is always yours
“We are inventing the future,” Jobs told him at the end of a three-hour pitch. “Think about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come down here and make a dent in the universe.” Atkinson did.
- Page 94, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Moinmoin is a wiki engine implemented in Python language.
Use scenarios
My purpose for this wiki is a personal knowledge base. Mostly scattered with drafts, stuff that don’t belong to my blogs. It will be a single user wiki. My focus is purely on adding content quickly, so I will prefer as less time on administration as possible.
I would love it to work across all my machines with minimal setup. May be I will put the wiki directory into dropbox or a private bitbucket repo and clone it on all machines.
I will be maintaining just the wiki data, updating moinmoin install will be managed by the most efficient `pacman`
Setup
sudo pacman -S moinmoin cd ~/docs/notes wget https://bitbucket.org/thomaswaldmann/moin-1.9/raw/0265eec31d99/wikiserver.py wget https://bitbucket.org/thomaswaldmann/moin-1.9/raw/0265eec31d99/wikiserverconfig.py wget https://bitbucket.org/thomaswaldmann/moin-1.9/raw/0265eec31d99/wikiserverlogging.conf
Copy data/ and underlay/ files into your wiki instance.
cd ~/docs/notes cp -rv /usr/share/moin/data/* data cp -rv /usr/share/moin/underlay/* underlay
I will be running moinmoin server with my user. So let’s change the ownership of these directories to let server access them:
sudo chown -R arun:wheel data sudo chown -R arun:wheel underlay chmod -R 755 data chmod -R 755 underlay
Run the standalone server.
python2 wikiserver.py
That’s it. You will be running a moinmoin instance at http://localhost:8080.
References
This post is for reference. Well after setting up, I didn’t like the way moinmoin stores the wiki files (something like: ./data/PageName/revisions/). So yet another didn’t-work-for-me experiment, the story of personal wiki setup will continue in another post on vimwiki
Anand (1971 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
During my school days, one of my friends recommended Anand. The movie, a masterpiece by Hrishikesh da, is one of my all time favourites. Been a big fan ever since These days I have started watching all his Directed movies, with the less known ones first.
Most of his movies are available on Youtube, Google video and so on. Many thanks to movie distributors (Venus, Shemaroo and so on) for making these movies available to us. Purpose of this post is to act as an index of links to online streaming urls for his movies. Hope it will save you little time.
If you subscribe to this blog, you would have noticed there have not been much activity for past few months. So Hello world! Yours truly is still alive, and a bit older and wiser, thanks to the sine wave of life
Where was /me? Somewhere during July, I got this idea of custom domain, a handcrafted stylesheet. And I got lured by tumblr.
World of tumblr
Tumblr was a snap to set up. Simple user dashboard. Great set of themes. Neat post types that categorize your writing and media.
Tumblr has a great community, I found it more focused on arts, photos and general themes (explore tumblr). Tumblr has totally nailed reblog experience. You’d find photos (usually quotations on relationships going fire across community). My blog was at the other end of spectrum, mostly related to technology and so on.
Spam killed my experience. Spammers would create tumblogs and like your post. That would skew the feedback loop with readers. Not cool.
And then my blog had a downtime (or blocked?) for no reason I could understand. They fixed it. But I wrapped and moved on.
I do maintain another blog of mine on tumblr. It mostly focuses on philosophy, spirituality, and other meta thoughts. It blends into tumblr community, and I am liking it there
On to posterous
I liked it. Markdown support for posts. Post by email was great too. I even started refactoring vim-blogit to support posterous. Customer/Developer support at posterous is awesome.
Posterous nails down collaboration and post-anywhere beautifully. They support embedding gists, tweets, scribd documents, so literally anything can be in your post And now they are focusing on Spaces and group blogs, I haven’t played with it.
On a quick glance, I feel exploring new community content could be better in posterous. Honestly I didn’t get a chance to get involved with posterous community a lot, so take my observation with a pinch of salt.
I couldn’t get a theme that was minimalist, yet customizable. I tried creating my theme. But testing it was a pain. The appearance editor could do better in terms of usability, highlighting errors. Gave up.
The other glitch was web-based editor. It is basic, which is ok; but somehow it skewed up formatting of posts. I spent few hours in some cases editing post, saving and looking at website to check the formatting 
If you’re into posterous, try embedding your code into Github Gists, documents to Scribd and including them in your blog post.
WordPress finally…
This blog started off when wordpress.com was still in beta. Has been with me through the college years, and much part of my professional life. Time to give it the attention it deserves.
And yeah, got the variety themes. A “Just Write” full screen editor. Formatting works. Imported posts from posterous
At this moment, my only goal is to write and share my experiences; with as much less distraction as possible. Let’s see.
