One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com
Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!
Back-up your data and, when you bike,
always wear white.
The ex command g is very useful for acting on lines that match a pattern. You can use it with the d command, to delete all lines that contain a particular pattern, or all lines that do not contain a pattern.
For example, to delete all lines containing "profile" (remove the /d to show the lines that the command will delete):
This will find everything but the regular expression you have specified. For example, if we want to find all the lines not containing the word 'foo', simply do:
/^\(\(.*foo.*\)\@!.\)*$
Just yesterday, I posted a comment on SO agreeing with a guy who said, "If you're a programmer who edits a lot of text, then it's important to learn an A Serious Text Editor." Couldn't be more right. Here's my 2¢ follow-up.
You had me at, "If you're a programmer who
edits a lot of text, then it's important to learn an A Serious Text
Editor." The worst part is that it seems impossible to learn two (much
less more) inside and out, almost by definition. You're studying edge
cases at some point, and the knowledge of how to accomplish Task X in
one doesn't usually translate. And there's always things I do in
"fringe" editors -- I still use JEdit for JTidy, Code2HTML, to search
multiple files, eg. Your main is a roll of the dice, and there's no
silver bullet, but yes, absolutely learn one and play with many. ;^)
Random addition: I'm behind a long post on why I think UTF-8 is really useful. Before I actually walked myself into an ASCII corner, it seemed like an insane hack. Now I think there's enough practical benefit it might be useful.
The Amazon phone is a direct line from my wallet to Jeff Bezos' wallet.
That's exactly right! So isn't that success for Amazon? More importantly, isn't that a plus for us?
Look, even I wrote about the power of the store in your pocket as far back as 2008. That's what's driving mobile sales. That's what's driving Apple's stock price. It's about a store where they know your name (maybe not you, but your name), have your credit line waiting, and match you with purchases as effortlessly as possible.
It's been painful, but one idea that has haunted me for over a decade, but that I finally accepted this year, is that the first world has too much disposable income. Painful not because folks have extra cash, but because I'm slowly accepting that it's culturally and systematically okay, maybe even beneficial*,to spend cash on crud. Even traditionally "poor" folk have cable, a cell phone, a television, more than a single pair of shoes, often a decent car, and have eaten fast food in the last week. That's not poor in the same way we used to think of poor, is it? Should folks be saving? Yes. But is it really exploitation that these luxury^H^H^H discretionary items are affordable and accessible?
That is, the US is a nation replete of citizens with money to spend. You don't have to have that much money to have a discretionary dollar today. (Okay okay, yes, yes, I know. But stay with me.) If we stipulate that many of us are going to waste money (My $5 for Unread that I finally gave up on is an example, as is last night's $3 for Vesper, right? Talk about discretionary spending...), isn't it better than we waste that money conveniently? Isn't Fire's Shazam for books and movies then a benefit?
I don't understand the Fire phone pushback. It's not iOS. But in a world where anyone making more than $25k a year is buying a few songs and movies every year, Fire seems much better at putting that store in my pocket than anything to this point. And that's the future in a first world economy.
(This disjointed post is why the good blogs edit, but I think you get my drift.)
Btw, this formatting issue with Blogger is killing me. I think it's finally time to get a new blogging engine.
* You can tell I'm still resisting this one. Big picture economic beneficial doesn't necessarily mean (nor not mean) ethically beneficial.
It is against this backdrop that many in the technological community are applauding the decision by Apple to tweak how the iPhone searches for WiFi connections. Through a relatively simple software update, the company plans to undermine a widely deployed system that stores such as Nordstrom have used to track the movements of customers to analyze shopping habits.
I think we have to realize that our activities in public were never private. In fact, I wonder when going to the corner store went from a very public experience to a private-by-volume one. You couldn't walk out of a mill store without everyone having an idea of what you'd purchased. When did stores and cities get so large that the people who frequented them stopped wanting to be treated as regulars?
Would it be better if communities were smaller and the surveillance was done by Mr. Hooper? If so, why? (There are obvious answers -- the speed and ease with which that information can be shared, the growingly consumerist society and the corresponding change in the nature of what's being purchased -- but what are the specifics of the functionally offensive ones?) What and whose societal values are reflected in your 1950-60s-style expectations of privacy?
Following their announcement of a new headphone module for the all-digital Lightning connector at WWDC, Apple could now be on the verge of killing perhaps the most legacy of legacy technologies: the analog audio jack.
"If your iPhone has been given to you by your employer, why are you bothered about losing any data?"
Because you find you're in the same jeopardy if you use your personal phone to access your employer's Exchange server. Fair enough in some sense, but the loaned car is at least potentially reversed here -- Your work data is going for a free ride on your device.
I understand there are edge cases ("But wait, you had access to work email, so you may have saved precious docs to your phone! They have every right to erase those!"), but the OP's shock makes sense. I'd expect some sort of middle ground where you could erase the Exchange account automatically, but not, say, my personal pictures, reminders, etc. Heck, just sandbox files in Exchange accounts (don't allow their being saved outside of the Apple ecosystem) for that middle ground. etc etc
That's from a post I made to an admittedly zombied thread on Apple support.
Our company is apparently setting this up now, and I've got to say I think it means I'm taking my email off of my phone. I don't mind if they trash that account on my phone or require that I lock the phone, or even could lock it by themselves, but wipe my data? Not cool. Surprised there's no alternative.
Finally, governments will sometimes do very weird things:
Standard time in the Netherlands was exactly 19 minutes and 32.13 seconds ahead of UTC by law from 1909-05-01 through 1937-06-30. This time zone cannot be represented exactly using the HH:MM format.
The NERD tree allows you to explore your filesystem and to open files and
directories. It presents the filesystem to you in the form of a tree which you
manipulate with the keyboard and/or mouse.
Even though I'm late to the party, this is kind of neat. I'm to the point I can usually autocomplete paths after :e, but this is a pretty feature-rich alternative.
Even more useful for me was what I was searching before stumbling over this: how to move from a split to a vsplit. Actually insanely easy: You move a window with the upper-case version of moving to a window. So Ctrl-W, L move the current window over to the right.
VIm is endlessly impressive. I see why you can really only be an emacs or a VIm guy. You're never going to learn everything about either, so time spent in one means lessons never learned in the alternate.
In other news, 200 rep away from getting to make unreviewed edits in StackOverflow. At some point, I should do more than just answer JSLint questions.
And yesterday we were reminded, again, that people like indie software. Even with all the changes over the years — App Stores, iPhones, iPads, etc. — people still like supporting the village toymaker.
That sounds like about the right mindset.
Okay, granted, all signs suggest things are going very, very well for the Vesper crew. I'm suspicious that Daring Fireball's readership makes for a heck of a near-psychologically-captive market. Would version 1.0 have had nearly so successful a run without all the "market build up"? (That said, the only time I felt it's gone over the line was when it talked about app pricing (it might have been this one, but I believe there's a longer one somewhere) shortly before Vesper unexpectedly showed up.) I don't necessarily begrudge these guys, but let's not pretend the toymaker didn't have a heck of an, at best, accidental marketing push.
And let's admit it, previous and continued success makes app making less risky and more fun.
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