Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
Geez, the default settings for the windows version of vim suck! It’s got all these crooked little ‘shift-arrowkeys for selecting text’ options and whatnot. I don’t want that crap! Autoindenting was completely fubar too. So much so that I couldn’t even normally insert text without each line violently shaking the left and right.
So I tweaked the vimrc settings to make Vim under windows as much the same as GVim for Linux as possible. I’ve put the resulting _vimrc online.
I also did some updates on the white.vim colorscheme.
Friday, July 2nd, 2004
“The Dutch Parliament has decided to direct Minister Brinkhorst and Secretary of State van Gennip (Economic Affairs) to withdraw the Dutch vote in support of the Council of Ministers’ text for the Directive on Software Patents. This is the first time in the history of the EU that such a course of action has been undertaken.”
Read all about it.
Friday, July 2nd, 2004
I’ve spent an eternity trying to find out how to get gvim under Windows to open files transparantely over FTP. According to the manual, it’s supposed to work like this:
:e ftp://[user]@[hostname]/file
But that didn’t work for me. I thought I tried everything, but it just wouldn’t work. Some red-coloured errors flashed by everytime I tried to open a FTP file, but I coulnd’t read the errors because they were gone too fast.
Turns out I had to make sure of at least the following:
- Don’t forget to create a temporary directory c:temp or c:tmp, or some other path which is set in the ‘directory’ setting in vim (type “:set directory” to find out). GVim needs it to temporary store the file there.
- Make sure the NetRW plugin is loaded.
- When opening a FTP file, make sure you put a DOUBLE SLASH between the hostname and any filenames. For instance, I tried opening the file ftp://hostname/myfile.php, and it worked. But when I tried to open ftp://hostname/mydir/myfile.php, it failed! When I entered ftp://hostname//mydir/myfile.php, it worked again. Weird stuff but who cares? As long as it works, it’s all fine with me.
I’ve got some more tips and pointers about the windows version of GVim. One of them is: “Don’t use windows.” ;-) Some other tips might be added to my vim page in the near future (where ‘near future’ in my dictionary is defined as ‘somewhere between now and a vague and distant future).
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004
No homepage is complete without an online Curriculum Vitae. So I’ve put mine online too.
Tuesday, June 15th, 2004
Today we’ve graduated!
Everything went great. The presentation was a complete success, and we managed to keep our nerves under control. The defending of the project went pretty smooth too. The commision asked some good questions about the process and the techniques, but we were able to awnser them without any problems.
We recieved some compliments on our communicative and business skills as well as on the techinical side of the project. Our final efforts of the last year and the defending of the project were praised with a whoppin’ 9 out of 10. It’s hard to get any higher than that, so we were extremely pleased with the outcome.
Next thursday I’ll be negotiating my contract for a full-time job at ZX Factory. If everything goes well, we’ll sign the contract and then I’ll be able to take a nice vacation of a couple of weeks. During that time I’m probably gonna be coding lots-o-shit and traveling around a bit.
Man, I feel great :) Jay, if you’re reading this… congratulations!
Oh, btw.. today is also the day that me and Merel have been together for two and a half years, which will be celebrating tonight with a nice dinner.
Update: It appears I’ve graduated Cum Laude. I was always under the impression that that was a real accomplishment, but now that I’ve done it myself it’s not that impressive anymore ;-)
Sunday, June 13th, 2004
OSNews.com is carrying an oppinion article by Radoslaw Sokol about why people blame spatial Nautilius.
For those of you that don’t know what spatial Nautilius is: It’s the feature of Nautilius (the file browser) which causes every folder you click to be opened in a new window. It’s the most hated feature of the new Nautilius and almost surpasses the horror that was Clippy in Microsoft Office. Radoslaw states that the fact that navigating in spatial mode blows is because users don’t understand how they should organize their folders and files. According to him you shouldn’t use deep-nested folders to store files because then spatial mode will indeed be ghastly.
I find it funny that both the gnome team and Radoslaw are defending an idea which everybody hates. According to the article, spatial mode is the best way to go since it most closely resembles the desktop metaphore. First of all I disagree with that statement completely. When I browse nested folders inside some other folder in real life, I don’t retrieve each folder from it’s parent, put it on my desktop and start searching in that folder all over again. I usually just open the folder when it’s still inside the other folder.
But that’s rather besides the point. The point is that clinging to the desktop metaphor no matter what is ludicrouse. We need to transcend these kinds of usages of computers because otherwise we might just as well throw our PCs out of the windows and start using the real life desktop anyway, right?. A computer should be easier to use than the real desktop.
One of his statements is the following:
“What is the real cause of all these attacks on the spatial Nautilius? In my opinion, it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits. It’s really hard to use a spatial file browser if someone keeps his or her files in a ten-folder-deep structure. Browser-mode file browsers hide the lack of thought and organisation in the filesystem structure; spatial ones do not.”
Nonsense. Spatial browsers hide the organisation just as much because if screen clutter and a lack of overview. The solution to this is a tree-view, not spatial mode browsing.
“Folder structure should be simple and as shallow as possible, and the “master” folders (something like My Images or My Music folders known from Windows)….”
Of course folder structures should be simple and shallow. But the fact is that most of the time, it can’t be. Folders are, for now, the only way through which we can organise our files. We need to keep things structured. For instance, check out this folder on my system: /storage/sound/mp3/Type O Negative/Life is Killing Me. I’ve got more than one type of sound file. I’ve also got more than one band’s music. Unless I don’t care about having all my sounds in one huge directory, there isn’t another way in which I can store these files. But navigating to a MP3 in the above folder will open a massive 6 windows on my desktop. Talk about screenclutter.
Next, Radoslaw goes on with this statement:
“one can click one field in the gconf configuration editor and turn Nautilitus into “classical” non-spatial file browser. Don’t know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn’t change the way Nautilitus works, I presume.”
Ouch, Radoslaw! You working for Microsoft or something? I always thought that usability came first? Now you’re telling me that we need to screw around with obscure old gconf in order to make up for the mistakes of the gnome dev team? No, no, no! All wrong! This is a commonly needed option so it should be available in the nautilus configuration.
“Don’t know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn’t change the way Nautilitus works, I presume.”
Wrong again! Don’t know how to use gconf in order to make nautilius into a useful file browser? Then just don’t use Nautilius, I presume. NEVER EVER tell users to go screw themselves because of somebody else’s mistakes. Users won’t take it.
Look, it all boils down to this: Users hate it. It doesn’t matter what you may think you know about metaphors, usability and organised folders. If the users hate it, the forced ‘feature’ should be removed, or you’re users will stop using your application. Simple as that.
By the way, I don’t use Nautilius at all. I hate it. It’s too slow and it makes me feel as of it’s made for morons. It’s not configurable, nor is it power-userfriendly.
Monday, June 7th, 2004
Well, I’m almost done. Just two more weeks and I’ll be graduated. First we’ll have to defend our graduationpapers and final internship, but I’ve got a good feeling about that. Only thing really standing between me and my bachelors degree is the Cryptology course, which should be finished somewhere this week. If the professor can find the time to correct it before the final grades need to be submitted, and if it’s rated 55+/100 I’ll be in the clear.
I’ve got good hopes about starting a semi-fulltime job at ZX Factory, easily one of the nicest companies I’ve ever worked for. I’m still employed there under a zero-hour contract, and I’m hoping that I can keep that for the summer and ‘upgrade’ by the end of the summer. We’ll see how it turns out. (Btw: If anybody has a job to offer in the Netherlands for my fellow graduate student Ralph, please let me know :-)
I’m going to have a pretty busy summer. First some short weekend trips to, amonst other locations, Antwerp. Next, a ten-day trip through Europe with Wouter. No planned destinations, no rush, no stress.. just random driving around. Wonder how that’ll turn out.
PS: On a side note: GTK 2 sucks. The tree/list implementation bites (though it’s pretty powerful) and what the hell where they thinking when they thought up the interface of g_strsplit()?
Monday, May 31st, 2004
Today I decided to take the deep plunge into Gtk 2.0 so I could start to port Nimf to Gtk 2.0. I tried compiling it with 2.0 bindings instead of 1.2 and I didn’t really have to change all that much in order to get it to compile.
Unfortunatelly I then found out that none of the signals in the panels where working anymore and I couldn’t find out why. So I took a quick look at the GTK 1.2 to 2.0 migration docs and found out that clists and all that stuff isn’t documented anymore. They’re still available for backwards-compatibility, but that doesn’t really seem to work since all the signals are now dead.
This will probably mean I have to rewrite significant portions of the codebase in order to get it to work again, so I might as well port it to the new GtkTreeView stuff right away. Conclusion: I’m going for an almost complete rewrite of Nimf.
I also decided to sacrifice some free time to The Gimp, so I built this one-time splashscreen / Help-About screen.
Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
A little while ago my coworker was visiting this site, and I quite liked the idea. I’ve always felt that there’s too much nonsense news around on the web, and scanning all news sources has become an increasingly difficult and tedious task. Fortunatelly there’s RSS, which allows you to view the headlines of all interesting newssources.
themirror.nl takes RSS to the next step by merging a couple of main news headlines into a single list to view. I liked the idea, but unfortunatelly the sources weren’t available. So I decided to write my own RSS feed merger in python.
The RSSmerger reads a number of RSS feeds from some source (internet, local disk, etc) and then merges all items in these sources into a new RSS feed. The order of appearance of items in their original source feeds are maintained in the merged RSS feed. This way you can simply call rssmerger.py once an hour and it will add all new headlines from various news sources to the top of the merged feed.
You can find RSSmerger here. It’s released under the GPL license.
Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
A new version of Pieterpost has been released: version 0.10.9.
This release fixes the last known bugs in Pieterpost. All that’s left is a feature request for a ‘forward’ and ‘reply-to-all’ feature. I’m not sure if I’m going to implement these features. I feel they are somewhat redundant in Pieterpost since it’s supposed to be small and simple.
Anyway, the changes in this version are as follows:
- Small fixes in various themes. Enhanced the readability. (Bug #0019)
- Groupname added to setup script. (Bug #0017)
- Fixed URLifying part of HTMLifying of plaintext. (Bug #0016)
- Added URLifying of email addresses (adds addressbook entry)
- Html code in plain text messages is not parsed anymore. (Bug #0016)
The text of all posts on this blog, unless specificly mentioned otherwise, are licensed under this license.
