robdelaney: I took a screen shot so that in case an editor at the NY Times was like, “Why the fuck i
« Archives in November, 2011
robdelaney: I took a screen shot so that in case an editor at the NY Times was like, “Why the fuck i
nevver: #OccupyXmas begins, “Buy Nothing Day”
nevver: #OccupyXmas begins, “Buy Nothing Day”
A Year to be Thankful For
OK, I’ll admit, I thought that last year was a big one to be thankful for, but so far 2011’s been the big one!
I’m thankful for my beautiful wife, of course, who makes me happier every day; concomitantly, I’m thankful that I seem to be doing a good job making her happy too!
I’m thankful for the furry family, too, with Juniorbird, my best friend since 1998, having a year full of cuddles and dancing:
Jake, who’s my wife’s best buddy and is enjoying his ninth year of puppyhood and good health:
And our new family member, Charley, who tries so hard to be good (I’m thankful he tries! I’m even more thankful when he succeeds!), is such a cuddler, and may be the only of the three pets who loves me as much as they love my wife:1
And, finally, I’m thankful for [my awesome new job. So what could be a bigger year than that?
(Spoiler alert: I think 2012 will be even better!)
Recursive Punning
Once again this year, I’m going to participate in Movember to raise money for men’s health. That means that — wife willing — I’ll be growing a mustache and looking like an idiot. This also means that:
- I’m taking suggestions of which mustache style I should attempt to sport
- I’ll be trying to use the story of Movember to “move” you to donating
That is all. Thoughts?
Just Call Me the Battleship Maine
I don’t think I’ve ever started a war in my dreams before… but there’s always a first. See, me and my friends, while we were just ten or eleven or maybe thirteen, our parents all knew each other from working with Oliver North during the ’80s, so you know that they were experts in all things clandestine; with pops like that, imagine what our backyard cap gun fights were like?
I mean, I’m sure the me in this dream never had to put up with those crappy rolls of paper caps. All red plastic strips of caps here, baby!
Anyway, so we were all on vacation in Cuba. Now, the Spanish Army was still holding on to the little island, it being the ’90s and all (I see what you did with time there, brain!), so we did take a little time out from our playing on the beautiful beaches to do a little amateur spying on the forces of that old empire.
It was easy to track down those darned Spaniards, because they only had the one ship in their navy around Cuba, and it had actually wrecked on a beach. We just walked on down and checked it out! They were using the ship as a supply base for their army, and we decided to see what was going on in there. So we entered through a hole in the back of the hull that had been opened in the wreck, picked our way around bags of rice, and finally got towards where a bunch of women in traditional dress — by that, I mean the dress of Lunch Lady Doris — were preparing meals for the soldiers.
What were they eating? We decided to figure out. Hiding ourselves in some burlap sacks that we found torn open in the hold, we crept forwards until we could see into the kitchen. Now, it was tough to make things out, because we couldn’t lift up the sacks but instead had to look through the loose weave — the last time I’d played this game, I lifted up the sack I was hiding under to get a better view but the cooks had seen us and the Guardia Civil had stormed through the hole in the hull, crazy patent-leather tricorn hats all glinting in the sun, to shoot us all. And I wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice, not with all the work it took to get us here!
So we crept up slow, and I was sure that at one point a cook looked me straight in the eye, but I guess she didn’t see me, because we finally got close and could see the scandalous truth: the Spanish Army was bankrupt and was feeding its soldiers hamburger patties made out of horsemeat! Oh, what moral bankruptcy they had, to match their fiduciary kind!
So we snuck out, patted ourselves on the back, and thought about how we were just like our moms and dads (they used to sit all together in the backyard on Saturdays, drink beer, and reminisce about the last few times they overthrew the Guatemalan government). Then we went home, told everyone about the horse burgers, and the fury of the American people brought our Navy to Cuban shores and our soldiers up San Juan Hill and our country to the brink of Empire.
And that’s how I started the Spanish-American War. Last night, at least.
Trying Out Vim; or, When the Geek Says “Get Off My Lawn, You Noisy Kids!”
There seems to be an age that people reach at which getting a new computer stops inspiring us to paroxysms of joy and starts making us cranky that things aren’t all set up just the same as they used to be. I fear I’ve reached that stage.
What’s the Tech Term for ‘Ossuary’?
I like working on Web things. Working on Web things means writing code. Geeks like me write code in programs called text editors — that is, apps that give you the most tools possible (fancy syntax-based coloring, predictive text completion, powerful find-and-replace, and more) to edit only the simplest kind of file (plain text, no font sizes or bold or even typefaces).
Being at said more mature stage in my life, I’ve gotten tired of trying the latest new app or switching when I change from Mac to PC or when they stop developing the text editor I’m used to or whatever. Plus, since I’m cross-platform now at my new job, I’d rather appreciate something that I could run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Okay, that’s a tall order. And, if you’re a geek, I bet you can guess where this is going. Well, you’re entirely right. For the rest of you, the story is this: they basically make two powerful, proven text editors that run everywhere: emacs and vim. Picking a side in this argument is pretty much like picking a side in Catholic vs. Lutheran or Mets vs. Yankees.
Naturally, this being a blog, I plan to pick a side.
Digression: Far Too Much Backstory
So my first exposure to these guys was back in college, when I used a text editor on a Vax to write scripts to do data analysis with SPSS. Depending on which specific server you signed on to (which was itself a function of traffic and of which tools you wanted to use on that server), you could edit that script with vim’s predecessor, vi; emacs; or pico. The server with emacs always had too many users on it, so I never really got a chance to try it out; I usually ended up on the server with vi and pico.
And I most certainly used pico. Vi has — vim too — this quirk: it’s modal. In one mode, it lets you enter text; in another mode, it gives you powerful tools to edit that text. You’re in the one mode or the other, which means that it’s hard to write text when you’re editing or edit when you’re writing. I generally hate modal apps and in college I quickly found myself hating vi. Pico, while almost entirely feature-free, at least got out of my way with that mode crap.
After college I was taken in by the newer-fangled text editors with actual graphical user interfaces and menus and buttons and all that good stuff. There was a long, passionate affair with BBEdit that ended only when I switched to OS X and needed a new version I didn’t want to buy. There were desultory years spent with Espresso, which looked good from afar but, close up, was far from good. HomeSite was of course mentioned above. Heck, I was even special buddies with the quirky Tex-Edit for quite a while.
Back to the Present Choice at Hand
So with all that under my belt, you can maybe see why I would be appealed to by an emacs or vim that had been around for thirty-ish years now. Plus, making all of those switches from one tool to the next certainly added up to more time spent learning than I’d burn learning emacs or vim just the once. So I decided to try the two. But, to be honest, I was pretty sure I already knew how it’d turn out.
Now, remember, I hated vi; so I was confident I’d hate vim too. And emacs sure seemed the right tool in abstract: I’m past the age at which I’m excited to see new stuff on my computer, and emacs has the advantage that it’s actually basically the world’s most powerful program and you can choose plug-ins and usage methods that actually let you accomplish virtually anything at all using just emacs, so I’d never need to learn another program again. (I’m pretty sure there’s an emacs web server out there somewhere, and I think they have an emacs first-person shooter as well.) Plus, you make it do all these awesome things by hitting control-something and typing in what you want it to do. Easy-to-remember and, actually, sounds just like a bigger version of my beloved LaunchBar.
So it was much to my surprise that, ten minutes into the tutorial, I’d already developed a deep loathing for emacs. I had to do that to move the cursor? That to edit the text? Remember that four-key combination to do the other everyday task? No thanks.
Another twenty minutes later, I was having great fun with vim (to the extent that one can have fun with a tutorial, anyway). All of a sudden I was starting to understand why I would want a text editor that actually was designed around editing text separately from writing it. I realized that vim may be crazy, but it’s my kind of crazy.
Tl;Dr; What’d You Choose Now?
So I decided to do the only smart thing: learn the hell out of vim by customizing it. Since it runs on every platform, I got it up and running at work, too. Then I set said customizations up on github so that I could keep them synced between home and work.
Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can read all about my progress with vim here and laugh both at my work practices and at the code I write. So, enjoy. And soon enough, enjoy my blog entry on A Month With Vim or Switching to Vim for GUI Geeks or something like that. And, of course, if you’re a vim user (or an emacs buff who thinks I made a horrible error), give me your hot tips here so that I can put them in my .vimrc straight away!
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