January 2010
1 post
Installing ArchLinux on laptop
Having had Ubuntu installed briefly on my laptop, I thought it was a bit bloated and wanted something a bit more lean (OK, a LOT more lean) on the machine.
Enter ArchLinux. Having read good things about it, I decided to give it a go. It is a lot more bare bones than many of the other distributions, which aim to be one-click installers. With arch linux, you configure everything, from network to...
December 2009
2 posts
ruby 1.9 and unicode strings
I was playing around with some unicode strings to test string handling in Ruby 1.9, and realized a couple of things. Unicode string handling in 1.9 is fairly basic. For instance, the upcase method of a string, only knows how to handle letters from A to Z. I realized this when I was trying to run upcase on a string containing my name (Helge André Gudmundsen), and the resulting string was...
peepcode - bad name, excellent content
I do not like the name of the company, but their content is top notch. Peepcode offer technical screencasts, and although you would think that one hour is little time, the material covered is extensive. $9 for each episode is cheap given the material covered, and there are also bundles and subscriptions making the per-episode-price even lower.
September 2009
1 post
nesting vim configuration files
I am on a quest to put all my various configuration files under source control, so I now have a folder called ~/dotfiles which contains various configuration files in a git repository. The dotfiles in the home directory simply call files inside the dotfiles folder.
I wanted to do this also for the vim configuration file, but I was not sure what the syntax was for calling a configuration file...
August 2009
6 posts
organizing files with leap
While I now try to keep most of my written personal information in a single text file, I have a lot of external reference material (e-books, articles etc.) that reside in folders on my harddisk.
Earlier I have tried to maintain a folder structure where material rests in specific folders based on content.
Lately I have thought about changing this, and to put all the files in a single folder,...
The trouble with the Segway →
I never quite could understand my own negative reaction to the Segway. Then I read Paul Graham’s essay on the subject, and he hit the nail on the head for me.
“when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather...”
– _why the lucky stiff
insert timestamp with vim
I often find myself inserting timestamps in text documents. I added two quick lines to my .vimrc files that allows me to insert a timestamp using the F3 key:
" Insert timestamp with F3
nmap <F3> a<C-R>=strftime("%Y%m%d %H:%M")<CR><Esc>
imap <F3> <C-R>=strftime("%Y%m%d %H:%M")<CR>
In normal mode, the timestamp is appended at the current position and in...
personal information repository
I put a lot of information in a lot of different systems. Login info, account numbers, to do lists, work logs, personal journal etc.
In my current quest to cut back on inefficiencies, I am considering switching to a reduced set of tools, one of which would be a personal information repository, which, let’s face it, is a pretentious way of naming a big-ass text file.
Starting today, I am...
priorities
when your friends die, you realize the stupidity of some of your priorities. what is doubly sad, is that it takes such events to reach this realization. r.i.p. carla
July 2009
7 posts
“Castles in the air - they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build...”
– Henrik Ibsen
vimperator
This plugin has gone a long way in making firefox my default browser instead of safari.
dynamic dsn
I am very happy with the services provided to me by DynDNS. With one domain, I can have different services on different machine, and serve them through various subdomains. I can post to my blog, ssh to my homebox, access email etc. all on different machines. Nifty.
markdown preview with vim
I was sorely missing the preview Markdown feature from Textmate in vim. However, in vim I am just a ! removed from the command line, so I wrote a little Ruby snippet that takes a Markdown file, uses Bluecloth to convert it to html, and opens the result in a browser. Then I created a mapping in my .vimrc file that calls the ruby snippet with the current file, and presto, feature implemented.
...
Games on the iPod touch
I have noticed a funny thing. The games I think I like are not the games I play the most. Brothers in arms, Assassins Creed and other slick games look cool, but I don’t find them all that playable.
On top of my list are various Tower Defense style games, and pinball games. Flick fishing (to my surprise) is also a lot of fun.
Now I am looking forward to Deep Pinball and Pinball Fantasies.
“A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed”
– Henrik Ibsen
vim geekery (the end of the blogging hiatus)
In my never ending quest for the perfect editor, I have returned to vim for a while. On the 43folders wiki, I came across a neat little trick to do a proto-wiki. By adding the following line
:map gf :e <cfile><CR>
to the .vimrc file, you can type gf to open a file named with the word under the cursor (or create it if it does not exist).
I toyed around with this, and was slightly...
April 2009
5 posts
“The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority”
– Henrik Ibsen
easter break
We are back from a very nice easter break in the south of Portugal. Three days of relaxation and good food, capped by a very nice and unexpected lunch on saturday.
Now I need to put on my trainers to try to lose those kilos that I gained.
spring
Walking to work today I passed a park where the keepers were busy mowing the lawn. The smell of freshly cut grass really brought forth the feeling of summer.
This, coupled with the fact that we could take the kids to the beach this weekend, has given me a distinct holiday feeling.
editor change
At work I have been using the Komodo IDE for editing XML files. However, I have to deal with fairly large files (as in 10K lines) on occasion, and Komodo slows to a crawl on those.
I have now switched to eclipse, which now has very nice features for searching and navigating XML files. Also, compared to Komodo, it is snappy!
great writers
This morning I was thinking about what separates great writers from the rest. To me, the ability to grab my attention and transport me to an alternative reality that I accept without question no matter how improbable, is one of the indicators.
What triggered this thought was that this morning I started reading “Man in the Dark” by Paul Auster. Five pages into the book I was...
March 2009
10 posts
motivation
Being a father of two small children, the time for extra-curricular activities (i.e. development) is very limited.
Breaking up tasks into bite-size bits (GTD anyone?) is a good way of moving forward. Instead of designing a total view, I can set as a target to place a single button. It leads to a sense of achievement, and keeps me moving forward.
If the target is too ambitious, I don’t...
twittergarten
sometimes reading twitter feels like watching children bickering in kindergarten.
music
been on a trip down memory lane. albums by afro celt sound system and grace jones have been procured.
metaWeblog-server
I now have an xml-rpc server running that understands newPost, getPost and getRecentPosts. Currently it only returns static data, but at least it is a start.
meta-meta-weblog
I am in the process of writing a bridge between MarsEdit and nanoc, and will use this blog to document the process. As the bridge will be using the MetaWeblog API, I guess this blog temporarily can be considered a meta-meta-weblog.
mac mini
I am seriously considering getting a mac mini for the TV in the living room. I already have an eyeTV stick, and ripping the kids DVDs would mean never having to worry about finger marks on the Shrek discs again. With my birthday coming up soon, there might even be a budget break for it.
“By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains...”
– Richard Dawkins
xml-rpc frontend to nanoc
As I have more or less made the decision to use nanoc for creating my own sites, I now want to try to write an xml-rpc front-end for it, so that I can use MarsEdit to create pages.
Objective C
In my quest to master Objective C, I think I will use the Head-First book on objective oriented programming and adapt the examples from Java to Obj-C. Should be an interesting exercise.
Static website generation
I am now checking out nanoc, a ruby tool for static website generation. Looks v. nice.
nanoc
February 2009
5 posts
xkcd
xkcd is a dead funny webcomic. One of my all time favorite is the sandwich.
Sandwich - xkcd 149
Apogee discontinues Windows development
As an extremely happy owner of the Duet interface, I chuckled when I read this press release from Apogee. How things have changed over the last few years.
Apogee Press Release
Wall of Voodoo
After a long time searching, I finally found three of my favorite tracks from Wall of Voodoo on the iTunes store. “Mexican Radio”, “The Grass is Greener” and “Far Side of Crazy” still sound as fresh to me as they did all those years ago.
Wall of Voodoo on the iTunes store
Revival
With the beta release of MarsEdit 2.3, I have decided to revive bachisdead from it’s hiatus. It remains to be seen if it is viable.
“we are friends, hello.”
– brian crabtree & kelli cain
November 2008
3 posts
org-mode
word of advice: check out org-mode. as an added bonus, you will learn emacs.
“There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in “cargo cult...”
– Richard P. Feynman, Lecture at CalTech, 1974
hiatus
I hereby retroactively announce that between the months of july and november, there will be no updates to bachisdead.
July 2008
1 post
snafu
bugger me. lappy went to the hospital, and is only coming back in two weeks. all this for two broken keycaps. wifeys windows laptop will have to do for now.
April 2008
1 post
twit twit
my ramblings are increasingly often broadcasted on twitter under the moniker HelgeG
March 2008
1 post
graffle
omni love. graffle is an amazing tool for making diagrams.
February 2008
1 post
hacking
today i feel really geeky. yesterday i built mysql on my mac from sources, and i upgraded the firmware on the dvd drive so that it became region free.
January 2008
9 posts
backup
finally setting up a proper backup system on my machine. includes total backup to time machine, and backing up of home to ipod and to remote storage in the sky.
“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the...”
– Richard P. Feynman in a letter to Koichi Mano (3 February 1966)
must learn not to repeat myself. must learn not to repeat myself.
omnifocus
is a godsend
leopard manual
just got pogues missing manual in the mail. looking forward to reading it and see what pieces of the puzzle i am missing.
spectrasonics
what are they up to?