Rubenerd

Clipmarked from Slashdot:

"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." — Albert Einstein

A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a

You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they’re, there, and their; your and you’re.

If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.

To prove my love for you, I had these flowers killed. Put them in water and it will prolong their slow, agonizing death.

If free will means obeying my orders without question, then yes.

Lose/Find, Loose/Tight

Slashdot has the the worst form of moderation system, except all the others that have been tried.

There’s no place I could be, since I’ve found Serenity…

Carrot!

This sig intentionally left blank.

Slashdot: Putting the ‘passive’ in passive-aggressive since 1997!

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak

Vim (left) compared to MacVim (right)

I try my best to include as much information from personal experience as I can when I do my reviews of software here, but sometimes I forget something critical which later involves me hitting my head on a table or similarly raised flat surface.

In August of last year I wrote up a review of the MacVim text editor which, as you’ve probably already figured out, is a native Cocoa port of the venerable Vim text editor. Back then I admitted I didn’t see the point of using MacVim when Vim was already available in Mac OS X and could easily be accessed from the Terminal [Wikipedia], but I stated I’d started using MacVim anyway.

I thought I’d clear up some ambiguity now that several months have passed: MacVim is the ultimate Mac text editor and I use it exclusively now for everything! It has become such a critical part of my life now that I can’t possibly imagine going back to TextMate or TextEdit [Wikipedia]. It’s an excellent application that works just as regular Vim does, but with all the benefits of being a native Cocoa application such as native file open and save windows, a broader range of colours for syntax highlighting… plus gosh darn it, it just looks nice!

Since my initial review I’ve also learned more regarding execution from the Terminal. I’ve broken the post up into three sections, to pretend I’m organised.

1. The mvim script

Paulo posted a question on my original review and answered it before I even could! If you’re reading this Paulo, do you have a website you want me to link to?

Thanks for sharing this! One question thou: I’ve used ports install MacVim and I can’t find the mvim script that is supposed to be shipped with it. Am I missing something?

[…]

Figured that you need to get the version from the project’s web site at http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

2. Using an ampersand to stay in the shell

This is something I already knew given I use FreeBSD so heavily now, but I realised others might not. If you want to execute MacVim in a directory from the Terminal but you still want to work in that directory, you can append an ampersand to the command:

% mvim [filename] &

This is really useful if you want to edit source code in MacVim and compile it in the Terminal.

3. Command aliases for the absent minded

Another tip from Unix is adding aliases to your profile shell script so if you’re like me and you absent mindedly type vim or vi when you meant mvim you’ll execute the right thing! First check which shell you’re running:

% echo $SHELL

Then append these lines to your appropriate file. Leopard uses bash by default but given I’m a FreeBSD guy I still prefer tcsh.

For bash, ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc:
alias vim="mvim"
alias vi="mvim"

For tcsh, ~/.tcshrc or ~/.cshrc:
alias vim "mvim"
alias vi "mvim"

Upon reading a few positive reviews, I decided to try the new AirMe iPhone application yesterday. I’ve been having lots of fun with it! AirMe is a free (cool!) iPhone and iPod Touch application that lets you upload screenshots and photos you’ve either taken with the built in camera or already have on your device to photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Photobucket.

One really useful feature it has include being able to scale images down before transmitting which would be really useful if you’re on a crappy 2G phone network or slow WiFi connection. You can also set it to only transfer images if you’re on WiFi.

The buttons along the bottom of the screen could use some labels in my opinion to make them easier to figure out for first time users, but aside from that I think it’s a fantastic application. And it’s free!

In this post are the two shots I’ve uploaded directly to my Flickr account from my iPhone as of yesterday. The first that you can see above is a horribly out of focus shot of a pretty cup of coffee from the Boatdeck Cafe where I was sitting at the time. The second below is a screenshot of the iTunes application downloading an episode of Cranky Geeks which appears to be taking a while!

Brilliant analogy but I don’t entirely agree: William Hung was fun and entertaining!

As I said on Google Reader, I reckon apathy is one of the most destructive forces out there. I don’t know much about ol’ Joe (only from watching The Late Show with David Letterman here and from what people have shared on Google Reader) but I know enough to reckon as long as some people still take him seriously, he’s a scary guy.

Clipmarked from ScienceBlogs:

Joe the Plumber Admits His Ignorance
Posted on: April 5, 2009 9:23 AM, by Ed Brayton

He was invited to speak at a rally against the Employee Free Choice Act in Harrisburg, PA, but it turns out he knows almost nothing about the act. So he just sputters some platitudes about politics when asked about the issues.

He keeps trying to say what he’s really there for is to stand up for the American people, but here’s the unspoken truth: he was there because someone was paying him to be there. What else can he do? He’s turned into the William Hung of politics, just desperate to appear in any mall food court they’ll book him at.

Unfortunately one of the only downsides to living in Australia other than the public transport (or lack thereof!) is metred internet connections: coming from Singapore where the internet is fast, cheap, reliable and unmetred this is quite a shock. All Australian home broadband internet plans come with a ridiculously low specified download quota, after which your connection is throttled or disabled. The justifications for download quotas are as dubious as the system itself, but that’s for another post… and believe me it’s coming!

I feel I should give credit though where credit is due and applaud Adelaide’s very own Internode for their service. We were approaching our download quota we were able to login to the Internode site and buy an additional data block which went live within 90 minutes. As with all our Internode bills and payments I received an email invoice and all was taken care of. No fuss.

Dear Internode Customer -

Thank-you for ordering an Internode Broadband Data Block!

You have ordered a 10 Gbyte data block, at a cost of $15.00 for the account […]. This charge will appear on your next invoice.

Note that it may take up to 90 minutes for this Data Block to take effect in our systems. This includes newly purchased Data Blocks being shown in online tools and 3rd party usage metering and for bandwidth shaping (if applicable) to be removed.

[…]

Regards,
The Internode Team

I can’t recommend Internode highly enough if you live in Australia… even if they do cap your downloads (everyone else here does too). They’re quick, no nonsense, helpful and they just… work!

Screenshot of my Armada M300 as a lean, mean Google Reading machine!

Given this is Sunday (as of two minutes ago), I thought it would be logical to post a Sunday blog post. That was an entirely irrelevant and superfluous sentence; then again so was this one. And this one too.

I’ve started getting into the habit in Adelaide where I’m studying to catch up on my latest Google Reader and Bloglines feeds first thing in the morning and before I go to bed on my cute 2002-vintage Armada M300 subnotebook in my room because it’s interesting but also relaxing. At these times of day there isn’t much light out so I have an even lower tolerance for Blazing White® website themes, so I decided to completely re-theme the entire interface of the machine to accommodate my picky eyes.

ASIDE: This bizarre post is mostly geared towards Linux, FreeBSD and whatnot, but the browser specific whatnot could be adapted if you have a Mac user or if you use that obscure operating system a small software company in Redmond makes.

Firstly, if you’re a Mozilla Firefox or Opera user with Greasemonkey or an equivalent user style engine, I’ve found the Google Reader Dark-Blue-Grey user style by hronir to be by far the most readable dark theme. If your machine has limited screen real estate like mine, the Google Reader Maximize Vertical Space script by Chase Seibert makes a huge difference, and plays well with the colour changes — an important consideration!

Next the browser itself: I first downloaded the beautiful MidnightFox Dark Firefox Theme which I’ve had lots of success with on my MacBook Pro, but then I thought I might as well take advantage of the fact Firefox is a GTK+ application and use a theme that would affect all the applications I use. I really love the dark Xfce-dusk theme, so I downloaded the Xfce theme package and added the following line to my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file. If you’re using a desktop environment you’d probably want to use it’s theme selector.

On Linux
include "/usr/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

On FreeBSD
include "/usr/local/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

On NetBSD or other systems with pkgsrc
include "/usr/pkg/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

Finally I customised the window manager. I use dwm on my Armada M300 because it’s ridiculously fast and lightweight even when running on very modest hardware, plus it automatically tiles windows. In the config.h file in the dwm build directory I changed the following lines then recompiled and installed (you could substitute these hex colours into whichever window manager you’re using too):

[…]
static const char normbordercolor[] = #404e63;
static const char normbgcolor[]     = #404e63;
static const char normfgcolor[]     = #000000;
static const char selbordercolor[]  = #222a36;
static const char selbgcolor[]      = #222a36;
static const char selfgcolor[]      = #ffffff;
[…]

The results are what you saw at the beginning of the post. I love this colour scheme so much I’ve even started using it for when I’m writing code and assignments because it’s so easy on my eyes when stared at for hours on end. Good times ^_^.

Welcome to your seventh (no kidding, we’re really in that need of help?!) grilled cheese sandwich observation lesson. Feel free to take notes.

As far as I know this is not a grilled cheese sandwich, and quite frankly it concerns me that you think it is. Please seek counselling.

Previous lessons

• Lesson six on 2009.03.27
• Lesson five on 2008.12.07
• Lesson four on 2008.11.14
• Lesson three on 2008.11.04
• Lesson two on 2008.08.21
• Lesson one on 2008.08.12

Despite having an Australian iTunes account and having purchased a few random tracks over the years, I’ve largely refrained from buying digital download music online. For me it’s been a case of value for money: sure online downloads are cheaper [most of the time] than an equivalent CD but I don’t have the freedom to rip the audio at quality levels I want for the devices I want. Perhaps the fact I’m also obsessed with future proofing myself plays a part too.

Going to Apple.com today though I found one more reason to dislike audio downloads online ;-). If I wanted yawn inducing, generic, mass produced, disposable, forgettable music I’d tune into a terrestrial Top 40 station. Coldplay aside of course.

Do I sound old yet?

Clipmarked from Wikipedia:

“There is a building in the Cayman Islands that houses supposedly 12,000 US-based corporations. That’s either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam in the world, and we know which one it is.”