Picking back up on the Emacs series I started earlier this month I would like to take some time to discuss the Dired mode for directory management.

I've used ECB in the past and found it nice, feature rich but in my opinion it had too much information and was in my way, not to mention it drastically increases emacs load time. So I removed it from my configs and now only use Dired. Once you get used to it it really is very powerful.

On the heels of PDF Generation with Pisa in Django I've had the need to pull from a library of pdfs and concatenate based on user selection. At first there seemed to be no good solutions but research and a recommendation by James Tauber (thanks James) turned up pdftk (the pdf toolkit).

"Prototypes can be deceptively attractive to people who don't know that they are just prototypes."

The Pragmatic Programmer

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these # instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Done on the blogs of Justin Lilly, Brian Rosner, Barbara Shaurette, James Tauber, and Eric Florenzano as well.

Today I had to come up with pdf generation for a project and was happy to find Pisa makes this cake-work. Pisa depends on Reportlab but you don't have to dig into Reportlab to get your pdf generated.

In messing around with emacs early this morning and a little google search I turned up a nice elisp snippet that works well for sending the current buffer you're working in to OmniFocus with a note attached.

With all the options in great Mac software these days, I'm sure I am not the only one who feels a little disorganized by the organization options presented to us.

I started GTD back in the days of Kinkless GTD. I was then a beta user of OmniFocus and I have been bouncing back and forth between Things and OmniFocus since Things reared it's pretty little head. Not anymore, I'm done with Things.

Wikipedia defines entomology as "that which is cut in pieces or engraved/segmented", or "the scientific study of insects". I don't claim to be a entomologist, nor do I cut the little guys into pieces but I do like to get out with my macro gear and teach myself something about nature, below my natural line of sight.

Prior to my new Macbook Pro, I was an avid Quicksilver user. These days I use Spotlight exclusively. I was exuberant to find a similar solution for Emacs. The past few days I've been using Anything.el and Anything-Config.el and it has made my Emacs life much easier. It does things I couldn't achieve with Vim and using the two together is like Quicksilver for emacs.

A couple days ago Brian Rosner posted a great article on Reusable App Conventions. If you haven't read it yet it's worth a read or two. I have a few in the works and want to quickly discuss sandboxing your development process for reusables using Pinax.

I had planned on posting the Python Emacs article for the series but am very short on time today (and probably tomorrow as well). To keep up with the masses, I do have a few short emacs finds I'd like to share.

Twitter from Emacs

This really does go against my article about Distraction Free Programming but aren't we allowed a little fun now and then?