Macros and expressions are two tools that serve the purpose of saving you from
either repeating a tedious process or the time switching back and forth between
shells to run scripts to manipulate your data with. Both can be (and often are)
used separately, but can be used in tandem to do some pretty cool stuff.
So let's introduce them and see how they work.
A lot of times when I meet "Vim neophytes" they mention that Vim is a great editor, but they miss certain features that they find in their previous editor/IDE of choice. Often this will be a case of them not having learnt the Vim way of doing the same task, but occasionally you'll have to tell them that "Vim doesn't do that".
Indeed, these days if you don't want to hop between different applications (all
of them having the primary purpose of editing text of some kind) you'll want
features that go beyond "editing text".
These days an editor can't just be an editor.
Yesterday, for some unknown reason, Pentadactyl decided that it didn’t want to work any more. I still have no idea why, and since I’ve been suspending my computer for quite a few days now, it might actually have to do with me upgrading Firefox from 11 to 12 quite recently. The problem was actually pretty easily solved by downloading the latest nightly and just fire that up, but before I did that, the sudden loss of Vim-style navigation inspired me to pick up an old project of mine:
Moving from Firefox to uzbl.
Every once in a while you stumble on that area of software that Linux just doesn’t have covered. You might now be thinking that I’d like to talk about audio and video editing. A fair guess, since you’ll hear people talk about these two as areas where the other platforms have significantly more sophisticated software available. But this isn’t what I’m going to talk about.
Being a CS student means that I will be forced to code in a variety of languages. A lot of our code will be written in Java or C++, but we’ll necessarily get in touch with many other languages, spanning over multiple paradigms.
By
no means am I a good programmer yet, but the exposure to the different
ways of crafting code has led me to think about what I value (as a
novice programmer) in a language. It’s, after all, my main tool of
expression.
Is it the brevity of the code? What the community surrounding the
language is like? Paradigm or strong vs. weak typing? Or could it be
that I need the language to be as “simple” as possible for me to be able
to formulate ideas?
En ny vecka gryr och jag står med hopp.
Yesterday I had an experience that was moving. It felt special, yet to the casual observer it would have been anything but special.
It involved a Rubik puzzle that I hadn’t solved yet, and I just felt like finishing it. After all, I know how to solve a 2x2x2, so this one shouldn’t have posed a problem.
Humour is a force that binds and divides.
It is as hard to define as
the force of love and yet as simple. When you burst out into an honest
laughter, just as with love, it just happens.
Similarly, what may be
infatuating for one, might be repulsive to the other. I expect everyone
to have wondered why person next to them is laughing, just as I expect
most people to have encountered love they cannot understand.
Within the genre of first person shooters there is a sub-genre that I like to call arena shooters.
Arena
shooters focus on dropping you and a bunch of opponents into enclosed
arenas with a bunch weapons with the sole objective of making your
opponents less intact than you are. With such a simple premise, the
creators of such games are forced to make the basics right, the core
shooting and the movement in the world. The expectations on the breadth
of the game are lowered in favor of a perfect "feel". Only when the very
basics are perfect, the creators start thinking about adding new
gameplay elements on top of the foundation.
Last week the company had a group activity where the following question had to be answered:
"How can we make our company seen?"
A broad but familiar question, one that I assume most companies try to figure out the answer to.I'm by now profoundly tired of the misconception that has been floating around in our modern digitalized society for too long of a time. It thrives within the older generations, but is in no way limited to them. It goes like this:
After posting my guide on installing Awesome 3.x I got the inevitable
question of how to actually configure it. This WM is not for the faint
of heart.
On the other hand it does offer a lot of customization,
should you know the lua programming language. I for one don't, but that
didn't stop me from tweaking the defaults, and for most people that will
be enough to get them started.
I've for some time now looked at extreme sides in conflicts/discussions
as a kind of a necessity. It's not that you will always agree with them,
but they will inevitably broaden the scope of the argument.
I might,
for instance, not agree with right-wing extremists, but having them
there forces one into debates that would otherwise never be had, opening
ones eyes to opinions outside what is seen as "normal".
When Unreal Tournament 3 was officially announced, a wave of mixed feelings went through the Unreal-community.
UT2004
was essentially everything most people could have ever wanted in terms
of a shooter. Sure, there were going to be UT99 purists who would object
to the style and the zealous Quake gamers who still claim that after Q3
the world could have stopped spinning, but disregarding people who
would never have it any different than graphically updated clones,
UT2004 was a milestone in FPS gaming. The mechanics were done right, the
content was abundant, the community was sprawling and everything was
kept at a impressively high standard. Within UT2004 we had almost
everything we could ask for.
I went to see Dylan Moran yesterday.
I was quite hesitant at first to
order the ticket, having two exams the same week. In retrospect
however, I would never be able to forgive myself for not taking the
opportunity to see my favorite comedian, bar none.
In my last entry I described my nocturnal attempts at installing an OS.
After
a little closer reflection, I shouldn't have been so quick to blame the
distros for dodgy discs and weird installs, sleep depravity and lack of
will to fix issues (which were bound to arise) don't give you
privileges to fling poo at good OSs.
So it was a late night, a day or so after the 23rd of April, Jaunty had just been released. I was very excited because I had been using Intrepid for a while, and I wasn't as satisfied with it as I was with Hardy, upgrade felt like a nice thing to do. Turned out that Jaunty had some issues that I at the time felt relatively unmotivated to solve, most notably no sound and an inability to install Awesome. Perfect reason to start distrohopping.
Awesome is awesome. That simple. The 3.x series introduced a tray which removed all hesitation and made Awesome the WM of choice for me. Unfortunately for Ubuntu users (which for the time being includes me) the official repositories are quite outdated.
The Acer Aspire 8930g has got a sound card that has not only been unsupported in GNU/Linux for a long time, it has also (to this day) never been a case of having the card work out of the box in any distro.
It's basically a "Intel HD Audio Controller" and uses the ALC889 codec. Support for this card was, according to the alsa-project.org mailing lists, incorporated in the 1.0.16 driver, receiving updates every version since.This is my new digital home.