shimweasel

Occasionally my mania for automation gets out of hand.
For instance: my current work cycle is this:

1. Edit code, hopefully improving it.
2. Hit compile button in Emacs, which regenerates the headers using makeheaders, invokes the compiler, the linker, and the stripper, and finally copies the executable to the ssync directory
3. Switch screens to the godawful obfuscated TCL program Silo, hit copy button
4. Switch screens to the xterm logged in to the Amida and start the program
5. Pick up the Amida and try to crash it.

Oh-ho, sez I, steps three and four are redundant! I could do all that from within the makefile, and hence from within Emacs, thus reducing my workflow to:

1. Edit code
2. Hit compile button, causing heavenly choirs to chime with joy at my infernal cleverness
3. Try to crash the Amida, which should by now be so intimidated by my leetness as to work perfectly, even if step 1 involved replacing every callback with a sonnet dedicated to the glory of Voltron. (The original series of Voltron, before that cat rubbish. If you’re oldskool you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

This would have saved me a good 5 seconds on each compile.

I have now spent a whole morning chasing this elusive dream. More, if you count my abortive efforts to get sshd to play nice. These ranged from searching for an ancient program called ‘tip’ which apparently helps automate serial comms, to pleading with minicom to do the right thing, to learning all kinds of arcane minutiae to do with stty, rz, and sz (anyone remember zmodem? God help me, I’m about to lapse into a nostalgic BBS trip), to attempting to decipher the source code of Silo, which, while looking like a UPX-encoded executable, is in fact nothing of the kind, and I can only assume has had some dumbass security-by-obfuscation variant of UPX applied to it to … what? Protect Amida’s source code? Given that there’s no actual key there, the process of recovering the original source can’t be that hard, especially given that I’m pretty sure it’s just a TCL hack.

Anyway. For this to make sense in terms of time management, I’d have to be working on this project for months. Once my inner obsessive-compulsive gets out, he doesn’t stop until the carpets are clean, the light fittings are scoured, and little robots are wandering around asking if you’d like a drink.