Sleep Spent

A few months ago, I learned a word for removing the skin from something. It was a wonderfully barbaric word, and a month later, despite trying desperately to ressurrect it from my memory and Google, I had forgotten it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have rediscovered the word! I believe I got it from The Onion originally, so it’s fitting that I would find it there again. The word is flense, as in “I ceremonially flensed the carcass.”

You see what I was saying about it being barbaric? This word sounds fantastic when used with one of my other favorite barbarisms, exsanguinate.

Aaah, the beauty of English!

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a big proponent of Vim. But recently I’ve been hearing a lot of stuff about Emacs and how 1337 it is. So I’ve decided to go all Emacs for a week.

That’s right. No Vim.

It’s tough, let me tell you. There are very few mnemonics, which I use constantly in vim. Sometimes sequences use Meta/Escape and sometimes they use Ctrl. I have found no explanation or clear deliniation between the two. M-d to delete from the cursor to the end of the current word. (‘de’ in Vim — ‘Delete’ to ‘End of word’.) C-k to delete from the cursor to the end of the current line. (‘d$’ in Vim — ‘Delete’ to ‘$’, the standard regular expression end-of-line character.) It’s like German genders all over again!

Vim is regular, orthogonal. Emacs seems to require a lot more rote memorization. :-(

And then there’s things like replacing strings, which is made into a multi-step process, complete with a menu if you tab complete at the wrong time.

Vim: :%s/wrod/word/gCR

Emacs: M-x replTabsTab CRwrodCRwordCR

Even then, Emacs will only replace from the current position to the end of the buffer. So it’s really more like Vim’s :,$s///g construct. You have to prepend M-< to the start of that so you can lose your place and get to the beginning of the buffer to do a truly global replace.

And WTF is up with the circular undo???

Anyway, I’ll soldier on. I’ve been doing this for a couple of days, so I have until Wednesday at 21:00. I’m trying not to put off my big editing projects; I’ll never learn it if I don’t USE it. But the lack of a (count)(action)(object) paradigm (or anything similar) is really messing with me. Assigning random keys to unrelated and needlessly specific actions doesn’t seem like the most sensible way to go about writing an editor.

I miss my text objects!

Girl: “How do you think I could have gotten the virus?”
Me: “Well, have you been sleeping around?”

I meant to say something about her computer sleeping around, but that’s not what came out. :-)

Fortunately, she wasn’t offended. And yes, we were able to fix her virus problem.

Ever wanted to see rejected ads? What if I told you they were funny?

Give it a go.

There’s a whole bunch that were rejected because they were too risque.... You get the idea.

I didn’t think it was possible to improve on my beloved LaunchBar, but I have been proven wonderfully, wonderfully wrong. The app is called Quicksilver, and it’s still in Beta. That’s OK, though, because it’s already even more useful than LB!

See the entry that tipped me off for some fascinating screen shots.

I found this in the QS manual:

One thing is guaranteed: after you have used Quicksilver for a very short while, the shortcuts will become second nature. You will inevitably find yourself typing Command-Space qs to launch Quicksilver, and then cursing the fact that it doesn’t have a launcher to launch itself with a hotkey. Macintoshes without Quicksilver installed will appear to be broken.

(Emphasis mine.)

I do this all the time with LB! And I love it. LB is the first program I install on a Mac I’ll be needing to use for any length of time. If QS can make that experience even better, I’m all for it.

Ever since a few weeks ago when I got a “thank you but could you add this for me please?” e-mail from a professor at SDSU, I’ve been working on fixing up Ph Client for a new release. I’ve been working on a system by which users can add their own ph servers, which is sensible. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s going to look very much like Fire’s Away Message manager, if you’re familiar with that. And not only because I have the code for that, either --- I really think it’s going to be the best way to go. I’ve been kicking it around, trying out different things for days, and this is what I’ve decided on.

Tonight I discovered that if you connected to some international servers, you’d get back accented characters. Characters which are clearly not in ASCII. So they were coming across as &Eacute; and ^ and the like. Non-optimal.

The solution? Interpret text in the value portion of the server’s query response as ISO Latin-1. Thanks to Latin-1 being a superset of ASCII, servers which respond in ASCII will still work.

Interestingly, since the RFC requires field names composed of [A-Za-z0-9_-], there’s no problems there. I found a French school in Quebec that was using elided names (Telephone) for the fields, and then including the full French name in the value (Téléphone). Kind of strange, but whatever floats your boat.

The more bugs I fix, the more I wonder how people can use the version I released two years ago. :-)

Update: It was brought to my attention that this wasn’t very clear. I’m not removing accented characters, I’m making them work. Thanks, Mr. Lorca.

OK, so call me a follower, but after the recent Wired article about shuffle play in MP3 software and iPods, I started thinking. There were a bunch of great ideas on a linked page, so I’ve put some of them to use. Now, a lot of them will require more meta data than I currently have (ratings, for example, or ubiquitous date stamps). Even so, I’ve been having a grand time with nothing more than the play count meta data.

Since Friday, I’ve been working on an Unplayed playlist. It’s great; guaranteed new music! I have a lot of fantastic stuff I never hear, and what better way to find out about it? I’m down to 2805 songs right now, or 7.6 days of music.

At this rate it won’t last long. :-)

Oh, yeah, and this is post #100. Woohooo!

Thanks to a post on WaSP, I just installed SafeHref. It should guarantee that my blog validates even if I post links like this.

In other standards news, I just recently finished working on my Dad’s company’s website. Good times there; I got rid of a ton of JS in favor of CSS. This was responsible for almost an order of magnitude decrease in file size, with more possible when they ditch the tables.

At the moment, though, the two unordered lists on the site (excluding the list of navigation links at the top of every page) don’t show their square bullets on IE6/Win. And I don’t know why.

/me became frustrated on that one and gave up

Suggestions would be appreciated, if you figure out what’s wrong.

My iBook sends current to connected FireWire devices when it’s on, or when it’s asleep and plugged in. When it’s asleep and running on battery power, though, it doesn’t power the FW port.

This is the way it should be. This is great! No worries about killing the battery after leaving an iPod plugged in all night.

I was mentioning this to a friend who worked on the iBook a few years ago, and he said he actually had a hand in implementing this very feature differently on the 12-inch PowerBooks last year. I thought that was pretty neat. :-)

I’m driving home this evening to attend a memorial service tomorrow morning. I’ll be back in SLO tomorrow evening.

I hope everyone is well.