Hi, you've reached the website of Mark Menard, Freemason, developer, businessman, photographer, motorcyclist and all around nice guy.
The main joy in my life is Sylva, my loving partner and friend. (You will see plenty of pictures of her. Also check out our site.) My professonal career is running a consulting firm concentrating on business automation and custom software. I enjoy software development, motorcycles, photography, dancing, freemasonry and travel.
Here you will find galleries of my latest photos, thoughts on software development, freemasonry, the occassional politics, and other things. Enjoy your time here.
Mark
An ongoing photographic study of Freemasonry.
To contact Mark send an email to mark@mjm.net. You will receive an auto response from my mail server to verify you're not a spammer.
© Mark Menard 2002-2007
IDE's
Well, for me it comes down to a few things, speed and stability being the leading ones. I used to do a lot of PHP development on remote machines. I used screen and vim. This combination has never ever let me down and it works everywhere I need to work. I've yet to find an IDE that has the rock solid stability of screen and vi. Add in a build tool like ant or maven and I have everything I need. Need being operative word.
I'd like some of the bells and whistles that IDE's provide. I've tried. Believe me I've tried to move away from screen and vim plus a build tool. I've tried Eclipse three times, and I've recently tried NetBeans twice for use in a Rails project.
Eclipse three times corrupted its workspace to the point of no recovery. (I've been using screen and vim for 13 years and have never lost work, not even 15 minutes worth.) Two of those corruptions were after a long afternoon of work, work which would have been inappropriate to commit to our version tracking system until it all worked, all of which I lost and had to redo from memory. The first two times I justified it and tried Eclipse again, the third time I'd had enough and went back to screen and vim.
My attempts at NetBeans were ultimately off putting because it is slow. I use a Mac Pro quad Xeon with 4GB of RAM, and it was slow on that machine! I can't imagine what it would be like on slower machines. Plus the GUI is just plain buggy on OS X. (I can only move one direction between open tabs using a keyboard shortcut. Huh?)
My experiments with Rails did introduce me to an editor that is about as close to an IDE as I've used in recent years, TextMate. I can highly recommend TextMate to any OS X user out there. It's a great editor. It's stable, fast, extensible, and integrates well with OS X. I've tweaked the Java, Groovy and Ruby bundles to my liking, and worked out a color scheme I like. I've been using TextMate everyday for the past few weeks and really like it. If only someone could make an IDE that worked like TextMate I'd sign up for it.