Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I’ve been busily adding more and more stuff to my VIM usage tutorial. It seems that the more I add, the more I realize that there’s important stuff not mentioned. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not trying to compete with the :help feature, just trying to give people the key stuff that they need to know to work well.

If you find it useful, please remember to check back every several days because it is changing very rapidly.

Thanks to Nick Parker for pointing me to this nice video on VIM usage, and for an extra tip as well.

I have started on a new miniproject. It is called Use Vim Like A Pro, and I will host it and work on it here. It’s for my friends and coworkers who are using vim for the first time, and for those who still use it like it was their first time.

Enjoy it.

I saw that someone in the Hamilton area was looking at my blog the other day. I have kin down there, and so I wanted to give a shout out. Good to see ya here.

I was very frustrated for a day or two. We had a classroom of students learning to do TDD in C++, and we were working in Vim (one of the best text editors ever invented, thank you). All the developers had the exact same copy of VIM, installed via cygwin from the exact same USB drive (not from the net), using the exact same batch file. So we were a bastion of conformity.

My editor was able to use the file explorer and did text and filename completion, but a lot of them did not. Eventually Jeff and I narrowed it down to the fact that the only machines that actually *worked* are the ones where I added .vimrc files. I only added about three lines.

    syntax enable
    set sw=4 ts=4 et
    set wildmenu

I set these options by hand, and none of them would enable completion or the file explorer. It drove me about half mad, until Jeff and I each sat at another machine and created a .vimrc. We tried the commands in turn, and found the answer.

* You have to set syntax enable, and
* you must set it in the .vimrc, and
* you must open a new session.

If you don’t start a new session with syntax enable in the .vimrc you will have a castrated vim to work in. All the best features are somehow enabled with this one option, and only on startup. It’s frustrating to the extreme, and may be the first thing I hate about vim. It is not well documented, and we only found it through experimentation. It’s an ugly fact.

But vim still rocks.

As a bonus, here is a .vimrc that’s functional and might be mildly useful.

” Automatically save the file before doing a make
set autowrite

” Handle indentation like a pro (use ^T/^D for indent/dedent)
set autoindent
set tabstop=8 shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
set shiftround

” Don’t wrap code in small windows (usually I don’t like that)
set nowrap

” Turn on some superpowers for searching and completion
set wildmenu
set hlsearch showmatch

” Turn on the man pages, accessible as “:Man something”
runtime ftplugin/man.vim

” turn on syntax highlighting
syntax enable
filetype on

” When searching, ignore case unless the pattern has a capital
set ignorecase
set smartcase

” Make F11 key add your test name (under the cursor) to the suite
map <f11> ebmz”zyw?CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_END(
OCPPUNIT_TEST(z);’z

” make vim more verbose
set showmode showcmd

Okay, they’re ugly. I said it. But they’re kinda cool anyway. Very novel kind of look to them. There’s more where this one came from. If you like the look of something that looked “futuristic” in the 60s, maybe some kind of scifi movie prop, then click on the pic, and you’ll see a variety of them.

I heard about TechSelector.com from the GeekBrief podcast and wanted to try it out. It didn’t have navigation aids but it did have some categories I was interested in. I decided to try MP3 players.

It did not ask me what formats I wanted to play. That’s hard to believe. I know that the whole world does MP3 and that some players do AAC and some do WMA and some do OGG. For me, playing OGG is really important, since I tend to rip my audio to Ogg instead of Mp3 (or at least I used to until family members started getting ogg-less players).

Still, I answered the questions and as a result, I got a number of recommendations for Cowon players. On the page where it listed the players, it also listed the file formats covered. I smiled. The cowon players almost all handled a variety of formats, most including OGG.

When it comes time to trade in my media player(s), or if I decide to buy for family, I think I’ll look at the Cowon iAudio line (or better). In the meantime, I am somewhat impressed with the progress made so far at TechSelector.

If you know me, you know my sense of direction is not very good.

When I walk out of my client’s break room my sense of direction uniformly screams at me that I’m facing in precisely the opposite direction that I really am. I have to step out, look around, and wait for the disorientation to subside. It is a little like that feeling you get when the car beside you drifts backward and that you feel you’re drifting forward: it is disorienting and even dizzy-making. I don’t know why it “feels” so opposite of the way it really is. Strangeness. Darned spotty memory also doesn’t help, because mine doesn’t preserve order of things seen and sometimes drops useful detail. I need a less defective brain, I think.

I’m pretty well protected since I have google maps in my blackberry, and a compass built into the rental car, but that error prone sense of direction complains. I can trust the compass and follow the map as long as I can see it well, and I know where I am. Of course, I don’t always have a compass in my rentals and don’t always have a NeverLost unit.

Finally I took my fearless leader’s advice and got a new navigation unit. His is a TomTom, mine is a nuvi (by Garmin). Now I always know where I am, which way I’m headed, and a route to my destination.

It’s cute. Great form-factor, very light-weight, nicely backlit touchscreen, and very very easy to use. It tracks your location very closely, and the instructions are very easy to follow. I had a lot of trouble with neverlost units blanking or changing display at bad times, and it always seemed to announce turns too soon or too late. Sometimes the NeverLost even told me to do things that were dangerous (get in the left lane, then make a right turn) or impossible (turning north from a highway with no ramps).

The only trouble I’ve had with this unit is that its points-of-interest are not always current. One BBQ place I tried to find has become a “Biscuits” breakfast restaurant, and another BBQ place is apparently a car lot now. I can even add my own points of interest, so I know where a laundromat and a nice BBQ place are located

I’ll probably get some kind of carrying-case because I fear I’ll get it scratched, but it’s small enough to travel in my bag complete with the mount and cigarette-lighter adapter. I’m now a functional cyborg (directions, blackberry, pda/ogg player, laptop with docs and tools, movie player, etc). I’m electronically enhanced. I can even switch to “pedestrian mode” and carry it with me provided I don’t use up the battery.

Now that silly brain can spend its time more fruitfully and worry less about my location and directions. Whew.

I’ve been looking at hybrids (dual-voiced guitars, both acoustic and electric) and archtop (hollowbody) electrics. It’s tough to pick which one I want to go after. I will eventually get one or the other. The hybrid gives a lot of flexibility, that’s for sure.

There’s a new one by Ovation, using duncan pickups (’59s) and fishman under-saddle pickups. It seems really nice in the videos, though the Michael Kelly, Crafter, Taylor, and Godin hybrids seem mighty nice too. Ahh, it’s so nice to have so much nice stuff and all the time in the world to pick something nice (after all, I’m gonna have to save up).

This pic is from MySpace where there is a page devoted to the guitar:

Pop over to the official web page to see the clean, beautiful black-n-chrome-ness of it. It’s like a classic harley. It really is gorgeous. No ugly details or hanging parts to distract, no unnecessary controls (though I’d like a separate tone pot for each pickup). Really, really clean and slick-looking.

There is also a nice mashup video on youtube showing off the versatility of the guitar in the hands of different players.

This is a lovely letter detailing Dr. Knuth’s opinion on software patents. Indeed, he voices the fears that all of us feel. Patenting software or any other algorithm is disconcerting to say the least. What if I find that my code accidentally infringes on patents of IBM and Microsoft? What will that mean to me as a professional software consultant? A professional programmer? A hobbyist? Will it mean that we will all have to fund expensive patent searches in order to release our software as open-source? What about our blogs? What are we allowed to express in code and in text?

I sound alarmist, I know. But it’s only because I’m alarmed.

Which countries don’t have software patents?

Paul Graham says that Microsoft is dead. He says, “All the computer people use Macs now. Windows is for grandmas…”