Month: December 2008

thousand updates

interdubs technology

The code management system I wrote for INTERDUBS happens to also count the number of updates that I publish to my clients. It just hit 1,000. Of those about 10-20% were cosmetic updates. Like typos or smaller changes in the html to make things more readable etc. Luckily less than 5% were bug fixes. I code in small chunks and those extensively. And maybe it is also a matter of routine. I hope I know what I am doing, and where changes would jeopardize the system. Of course stating this is inviting trouble. A thousand times I changed the running INTERDUBS. While it was in use by clients and admins. And: nobody ever noticed. Flying the airplane and fixing it. I really love this part of the project: Somebody has an idea. I look at it, and can tell them right away how doable it is, or in the best cases the reply email is as terse as “good idea! done”.

The fast majority of all the good things that came in those 1,000 updates were actually customer ideas. The people using the system know best what they need. It is really great being able to listen to them and to implement what they want.

change comment colors in vim

technology

Syntax coloring in vim is pretty awesome. Comments however are by default blue. A color that is hard to read if you have a black background on a LCD screen.

It turns out that this pretty easy to change. For perl you would simply do:


mkdir -p ~/.vim/after/syntax/
echo highlight perlComment ctermfg=DarkGreen guifg=DarkGreen >> ~/.vim/after/syntax/perl.vim

This worked right away after adopting the C example of the documentation. I am sure that php etc will work similar.

numbers: don’t count on it

Apple M$ technology

I am an casual office software user. I write things in vi or text edit. And yes, that’s how they sound. I never was that big in to spread sheets. But graphing solutions I need. I had written my own things for SGI, but even though OS X is OpenGL as well, it is just too much work to maintain.

Since my kids now start using office software I thought I’d get them iWork. Big mistake. Pages is ok (compared to vi and text edit). Numbers however is just outright lame. I hate the fact that Apple is able to pretend that this pile of junk is software that you can make an attempt to sell. Trying to graph anything in this turd of a bloatware reveals how 0.5 ass this thing is. The problem is that crappy software is worth negative money: It took me hours to figure out that it was actual this ‘spreadsheet application’ that was just unable to do even simple tasks.
“Numbers” has no understanding of time. I will download now Mac Office 2008. Which is even reasonably priced these days. Looking forward to use Microsoft software. How weird is that!