Engineer’s Attempt at Writing

Does anyone know how if there exist an emacs extension that allows you make comments on the source code. I am talking about comments boxes like the one in MS word. I do not want to modify the source code by adding comments to the file.
I am asking this because I need to perform code review, and I think that printing the source code on paper for each member of the review team is a waste of papers. I am curious to know if there are any free softwares that allows you to annotates source codes and saves the annotations in a separate file. Then we it comes time to meet face to face, we can just step through the list of comments/annotations and discuss it.

I did a little google search and found that there are some web based code review systems out there. However, they are way too complex for what I need. From the little descriptions I read, these systems were built for collaborative code reviews where people do not meet face to face. I just want a simple system that allows me to do annotations. Ideally this will be an emacs extension as emacs is the main editor I use.

I went hiking last Saturday to Ramona Fall, which is right by Mt. Hood. We arrived there at around 2pm. After walking about 1.2 miles, we tried to find the bridge to cross the river. However, the trail must not have been officially opened because we didn’t find any bridge. My friends were my daring and cross the river (a small river) on a small tree trunk. However, I was not as bold, and I had to back track to cross on a bigger tree trunk. Even on the bigger tree trunk, I was not comfortable because I was afraid I might fall into the river.

After we cross the river, we started our hike to the waterfall. We decided to pick the longer trail to the water fall because the hiking book said to do so. But going through the longer trail was a mistake because the entire trail was covered with snow. My shoes were not waterproof and by the time we arrived at the waterfall, my shoes and shocks were wet. I had to walk back to the start of the trail in wet socks and shoes; it totally sucks. However, it was worth it because Ramona Fall is truly beautiful. If you ever visit Portland in the summer time, you should definitely go there.

Mt. Hood

Snow on the trail

Ramona Fall

Me standing next to the fall. I was totally tired out when we got there; walking through snow is hard.

One thing I don’t like about emacs is the large number of backup files that it creates. However, this is really a necessary evil. The backup files have save my life many times. I am careless sometimes, and I may accidentally replace one of the files while using the mv/rm command. But I really hate having to see all of those files ending in the ~ sign scatter around my directory.

I searched online and found a solution where all the backup files are moved into a single directory. For instance, I had all of my backup files moved into an invisible directory ~/.saves. However, I find that there are way too many files in the ~/.saves folder and it is quite difficult to find the file you want sometimes. I am pretty sure emacs has a way to automatically recover the backup file without you having to manually locate the file and move it. I didn’t try to figure how to do that because I wanted to place all of the backup file into an invisible directory in the directory where the original files resided.

I search some more, and it turned out that you can easily do this by setting the backup-directory-alist. Basically if you put this line { (setq backup-directory-alist (list (cons “.” “.emacs_backup”))) }into your .emacs file, then all of your backup files will go into the invisible directory .emacs_backup in the directory where the original files are. If the invisible directory doesn’t exist, then emacs will automatically create it for you.

The more I use emacs, the more I like it as my primary editor. Now if I can figure out a way to get it to start faster, everything will be perfect.
(setq backup-directory-alist (list (cons “.” “.emacs_backup”))).

We made a mistake last week. Rather than going to the eagle creek trail near the Columbia Gorge, we ended up going to eagle creek in Clackamas. Although the trail along the river was good, this trail near the Columbia Gorge was better.

The scenery along the entire trail was very beautiful. There were waterfalls everywhere; some small and some large. Punchbowl fall and tunnel fall were very beautiful. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get up close to the Punchbowl fall. If the water had been warmer, I think we could’ve gotten closer to the waterfall, but it was still not that bad. Tunnel fall was very interesting; I think the park service blasted a small tunnel along the trail so that people can continue further to the top of the mountain. This tunnel allows you go behind the waterfall; it is kinda cool to say that you went behind a waterfall.

Some waterfall near Punchbowl fall

Tunnel fall

Start of the eagle creek trail

Lower punchbowl fall

The tunnel

Punchbowl fall