huh!?

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.

I have had a love/hate relationship with vim over the years, but since I now regularly work in three different environments (Mac, Unix and (shudder) Windows), having a common editor with a common configuration is rapidly proving itself to be a win.

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.

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 bothered by the fact that there was no visual indication as to whether a file exists or not. I then came up with a little hack to resolve the situation. First, I changed the shortcut to create a file with the extension hw (for helgewiki).

:nmap hw :lchdir %:p:h<CR>:e <cword>.hw<CR>

Then I created a small ruby script that collects all the file names in the wiki directory and creates a syntax definition file where each filename is defined as a keyword (the file extension is ignored). This script is automatically invoked when a file is saved. I also set files with the extension hw to use the helgewiki syntax definition.

class HelgeWiki
  WIKI_PATH = "D:\\txt\\protowiki"
  SYNTAX_PATH = ENV['HOMEDRIVE']+ENV['HOMEPATH']+"\\vimfiles\\syntax\\"
  SYNTAX_FILE = "helgewiki.vim"
  SYNTAX_PREFIX = "syntax keyword identifier"
  WIKI_FILE_SUFFIX = "hw"
  def parse
    @wiki_names = []
    File.delete(SYNTAX_PATH + SYNTAX_FILE) if File.exists?(SYNTAX_PATH + SYNTAX_FILE) 
    file_mask = /(\w+)\.#{WIKI_FILE_SUFFIX}/
    contains = Dir.new(WIKI_PATH).entries
    contains.each do |file|
      if file =~ file_mask 
        @wiki_names.push($1)
      end
    end
    sugar = SYNTAX_PREFIX + " " + @wiki_names.join(" ")
    File.open(SYNTAX_PATH + SYNTAX_FILE, 'w') {|f| f.write(sugar) }
  end
end
h = HelgeWiki.new
h.parse

It is kludgy, and I am not sure it scales well, but for now, I have a cheap, functional, barebones plain text wiki with no special syntax needed for links.

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.