Vim Filetypes

At work I do a lot of work with Oracle databases. Which also means I end up doing a lot of editing of files with funny endings like *.psc, *.prog, *.proc. Mostly file type endings that are meaningless and made up. So in order to get my install of gVim working properly with these goofy tags I had to force it to associate them with the plsql filetype built into vim.

Well, I originally had all of this inside of .vimrc file (or _vimrc under Windows XP). But I noticed that it wasn’t working the other day (something I honestly paid little attention to before because 99% of edits were so simple and quick). Well, after looking around forever on the internet trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work in my vimrc (which I never figured out by the way) I went back to the vim documentation and resorted to creating a third vim configuration file.

As a side note here, it is getting to the point that vim has taken so much of my time to configure and learn that if I had to do it all over again, there is a good chance I’d picked another editor to master. I started this blog in 2005 a month or two after starting with Linux. To this day I still find myself feeling lost everytime I use Vim as more than a notepad replacement. Its just that complicated. Thats scary.

Back to the point of this post though. For some reason (which I’ll never find out probably) I ended up having to create a file called filetype.vim and sticking it in $VIM/vimfiles. I have posted the file with the rest of my vim config files so anyone interested can see what I did. Like all of my other files (which have been updated as well) it is nicely commented.

And one more thing before I forget. When in command mode in vim try some of these commands. They have become invaluable for me.
: echo $HOME
: echo $VIM
Those will output where each of those directories are. Which is not always so obvious. Especially when your switching OSes on a regular basis like myself (XP -> Linux -> Vista > OS X -> Solaris).

Enjoy the Penguins!

Vim Fonts

I know very little about fonts or how they work but that doesn’t stop me from attempting to learn. So today I opened up Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition for Visual Basic and thought to myself, “Gee that’s a good looking font.” So naturally I went back to Vim and attempted to load the same font. All I could think to myself after seeing it was, “Ugh!” It looked horrible. Now, I don’t know why it would so bad in Vim and not in Visual Studio but it was totally awful. So I went searching as for possible reasons why. My search was interrupted but I did learn a little about a vim and setting fonts

set guifont=ProggyCleanTTSZBP:h12:cDEFAULT

Personally, it never occurred to me what that “cDEFAULT” meant at the end of that line. Today I discovered it represents your encoding. And that’s where all the great discoveries ended. Because no matter what I did to setting it never got better. It got worse most of the time, but never better. Perhaps another day….

Enjoy the Penguins!

Using Vi

I use Vim a lot. For almost all my text editing on a regular basis. On my Mac I use MacVim. I have XCode installed. Wonderful program I guess but I have yet to use it. But how many people actually Vi (not Vim) on a regular basis. I don’t. And why should I? Vim does everything Vi does and more.

The other day at work though I was tasked with editing some files on our servers. Mainly bash scripts, a couple of SQL packages, and I was forced to Vi. Using Vi is a whole other game from Vim. Things like syntax highlighting don’t exist. Niceties like your rc files don’t exist. The difference between insert and command mode is hard and unforgiving. In Vim its softer. You might be in command mode, but a lot of time you’d never know it the way you still navigate thought the text.

I’ll tell you though. If you want to learn how to use Vim, learn Vi. It’ll make a man out of you.

Enjoy the Penguins!

The quest for my own site

Before diving in with lots of money and time I decided to play it safe. I installed all the necessary components on my desktop and began to work through all the things I would have to do in order to start my own blog using in a custom home brew blogging engine.

I installed all kinds of wonderful things I never had a need for. Like Apache, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, and some other minor things that aren’t worth mentioning. Getting everything up and running… not hard. Getting everything working together… a little more difficult. Rolling it all into a functional home made blog… that will take some time. I think I can do it though. I don’t see why not after all?

There are other alternatives out there. I will eventually blow away rails probably and trying something like Merb, but for now I’m still experimenting with Rails. At this point my biggest challange I believe is the database for the backend. Setting up all the necessary tables, columns, links, keys, etc. There is a lot of thought that goes into a working production level database. Its one thing to make this things for class as a joke for your grade in school, but its another when it means something to you.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Hosting my own site

So I want to move away from free WordPress to my own blog hosted at my domain. I don’t know what domain I would take. All the obvious ones are taken, which is alright I suppose, I’m not really disapointed to be honest, but fair is fair. The question here though is where and what do you recomend?

I was thinking I would go with Slicehost. They look nice. Sound nice. Hell, I don’t really have anything else to go on. I was also very curious about Merb. I’ve only recently discovered it as an alternitive to Ruby on Rails but I’m already curios as to how nice it is; comparitively speaking of course. I guess at this point, one thing is for certain. I would like to do the site in Ruby. I would also more than likely run CentOS, and use a MySQL database. No offence to Gentoo, but I’ve honestly never my kept my Gentoo box “stable” for more than about a month or two at a time. At that rate my website would go down every other month, I can’t have that.

A couple of other things I have seen around that sparked my interest are Thin and Nginx. I just discovered both of those today, but they look like promising paths to go down as well. I’d really rather not take the easy road. I mean what fun is that? Anyone can install WordPress. I like the idea of doing it from scratch. If worse comes to worse I own a static page. At best I fully functional blog.

Now, using a prebuilt system like WordPress does have its advantages. Outside of being pre-built, it comes with a wonderful administrative front end. Its well tested, stable, and popular. Its flexible and allows for themes and all kinds of other wonderful things. Things I’ll have to come up with on my own.

So I don’t know what to do at this point. Suggestions maybe?

Enjoy the Penguins!

Possible New Yahoo! Homepage?

On my girlfriend’s computer (which explains the Vista) everytime I visit Yahoo! now, I recieve a homepage that looks like this? Perhaps a peek at the future for any user who isn’t as lucky as I.

Enjoy the Penguins!

When I grow up…

Unlike the guy who writes the Linux Haters Blog I haven’t given up on this thing called blogging. Instead I started working for a living so I don’t always find it so easy any more to write here. Though I do still enjoy it. On to the post.

So, despite being 24, there is still a lot I want to be when I grow up…

I want to be that guy who is so good at computer programming, if the program doesn’t work the way he wants, he simply changes it. I know some guys like that and I don’t like them. Why? Because their better than me and I’m allowed too. Language here is irrellavent. It doesn’t matter if its C/C++, Java, or something odd like Python, Perl, or Ruby. I want to, at the drop of a hat say, I don’t like how this works, I shall change it. And then two, maybe three, days later, I have a diff file worthy of a king.

I want to be that guy who appears, by all visible means, to be the master of his favorite language. I have some favorites, but I’m a master of none of them. Is it my fault I’m not? Why hell yes. But at this point I haven’t done anything about it. Will I? Knowing myself like I do there is a good chance I will not. Just like there is a good chance I won’t finish the book I’m reading either.

But then again, being me isn’t all bad. When I first started using Linux I couldn’t write Hello World! in any language much less know what someone was talking about when they said they “Wrote Hello World.” I can now do things with computers other only dream about. My mastery of SQL is reaching a scary level (because of my current job). Its just my luck I suppose that I really don’t care for SQL at all. It bores me to a great extent, and no matter how much better I get at it, I still don’t like it any better. If I never wrote another “If… from… where…” statement I would probably not be bothered by it at all.

And one more thing that bugs me. Has anyone ever noticed how absolutely hard it is to teach yourself something “just because you want to.” I want to learn C#. But with no real reason to other than “I want to” its a very tedious process. I find it hard to keep interest in it. I get bored. I find myself desperatly seeking programs to write, only to become bored with those as well. What am I to do?

Enjoy the Penguins!

ps. Paludis has been updated quite a bit since my last post. Break yourself and upgrade.