I mention this because a few days ago my wife and I came up with an idea for a cool web app. Tonight we were able to buy and setup everything we needed to get started coding. The domain is registered, the server is running, and the databases have been created. Ain’t technology grand?

Suffice it to say I usually need to wake up somewhere in between the those two times… and that waking me up is the final practical exam for mad scientist trainees enrolled in Reanimating the Dead 101.

I may have to become one of those evil “morning people” because 8:45 is just too late and I’m starting (after 9 years of marriage, grant you) to feel bad for what my wife has to do to get me up. I guess this what that whole “acting like an adult” thing is all about.

Anyways, the source of my scheduling issues seem to stem from a strange artist-like quirk of my personality – I really need to feel inspired in order to sit down and code. If my muse is there it can be scary how much code I can write in just a few hours. On the flip side, forcing inspiration can be hard – very hard. I seem to want to mentally sabotage the effort – there’s always something more interesting or more important I should be doing.

I think taking the next step to better self-scheduling/not procrastinating is difficult because I’ve been very successful at slaying the first dragon in this quest – hitting deadlines. I’ve been really good over the past year with the vast majority of my deadlines. There have been a few nasty outliers, that’s for sure, but for the most part I’m getting quite unaccustomed to the lovely sound a deadline makes as it whizzes past.

Now that I’ve dealt with my issues well enough to not hurt other people, the only person I’m still negatively affecting is myself. I still have to put in a good deal more stressed-out crunch time and heroic efforts than I would like. It’s one thing to beat my muse into submission so that I don’t negatively affect someone else and a whole other thing to try to smack my muse down to the point that I don’t have to work late to make that happen.

The technique I’m currently trying is a combination of better/earlier delegation combined with daily or near daily minimum levels of effort for ALL projects I’m currently working on. I sure do hope this works because I’m getting really tired of working late but at the same time I actually love the pace of my schedule!

The clencher though was when I discovered that a null object error that would only crop up when I would save a file out from my test SWF – and even then, it wasn’t consistent. I was able to fix the bug, but I haven’t been able to nail down exactly what was happening. As best I can tell, opening a FileReference dialog interupts the normal process of the garbage collector and it appears that the bug was causing my code to be dependant on the rapid cycling of the garbage collector to hide it’s mess and prevent it from throwing runtime errors.

And after all of this I just discovered a particular edge case that breaks the RLE compressor I wrote for my TGA (Targa) image exporter. Ugh. Gonna have to deal with that one in the morning.

But then, on a whim I simple restored Eclipse’s keyboard shortcuts and everything worked… almost. Now, I could open the new class dialog, but no matter what I did I couldn’t tab onto the damn Browse button to select my classes base class. The urge to go find a bone, howl, and beat on the computer was strong at this point. Luckily, before I before I began raiding the company fridge for whatever bone I could find I tweeted about my problem and a follower of my Dominic Graefen (@devboy_org) tweeted back that it was an OS X option! WTF?!?

Turns out Dominic was dead on, it is an OSX option – toggle full keyboard access. It’s keyboard shortcut is Control+F7 – dangerously close (particularly with my flailing about trying to make the editor regain focus) to Command+F7, which in Eclipse changes to the next View. I turned off the system keyboard shortcut and am now happily in Eclipse keyboard nirvana – haven’t touched the mouse in a solid 15 minutes – woo! Thanks Dominic!