September 29, 2006 at 8:02 pm · Filed under Computers, General
In the 80’s we had megahertz speed processors, megabyte sized disks, and kilobit speed wans with megabit lans.
In the 90’s we still had megahertz processors, but gigabyte sized disks, megabit wans and 100 megabit lans. wireless was megabit.
Here we are in the 2000’s and we have gigahertz processors and soon, terabyte sized disks. On the wan side we are in the multiples of megabits still but lans are gigabit. wireless may reach the gigabit with UWB.
We may never have terahertz processor cores.
What will he do with terabyte disks and terabit lans?
September 29, 2006 at 6:19 pm · Filed under Computers, General
To be honest, I prefer a good GUI IDE for development projects. MSVC 6 with Visual Assist X rocks for C++. For the Rails development I do on my windows laptop, however, I just use a combination of Scite, standard Windows explorer, and a cmd window. It isn’t Textmate, but it isn’t bad either. I’ve tried Eclipse, but it usually lets me down. It is confusing to install. It can be confusing to import an existing project. It may not even do what I need. It is too complex to configure. It is also quite large (ie. slow). If it had a new killer feature, I might reconsider it in the future.
Occasionally, though, I need to work on the Unix box that has our code. This means that I need a decent editor under Unix. This means Vim.
Vim is really good at dealing with all the different file types out there and providing support for syntax highlighting as well as proper indentation and completion. Recently, I had to create a .vimrc file in order to edit some code and get the spacing properly set.
Here are some good links for that:
A great page on using VIM for Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Interesting sections on using VIM as and IDE (relevant for other languages as well)
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoUseVimWithRails
A nice small blog post on a vimrc
http://www.quotedprintable.com/articles/2005/11/24/vimrc
A nice complicated example
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/files/vimrc
When I setup my vimrc, I always turn off tabs for everything except makefiles. The vimrc is expressive enough to handle conditionals based on the file type involved. For example, here is one of my .vimrc files (I have several similar files on various accounts). Notice how it is setup for Python, but was easy to pull off the necessary differentiation just for ruby.
set nocompatible " We're running Vim, not Vi!
syntax on " Enable syntax highlighting
filetype on " Enable filetype detection
filetype indent on " Enable filetype-specific indenting
filetype plugin on " Enable filetype-specific plugins
set tabstop=4 ” tabs are 4 spaces!
set shiftwidth=4 ” tabs are 4 spaces!
set expandtab
set pastetoggle=
au BufNewFile,BufRead Makefile set noexpandtab
au BufNewFile,BufRead makefile set noexpandtab
colorscheme elflord
augroup ruby
autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre *.rb set tabstop=2
autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre *.rb set shiftwidth=2
augroup end
July 2, 2006 at 12:26 am · Filed under General, Windows
When you want to get rid of a lot of startup crap that gets installed on a computer,
just do:
start msconfig
It gives you a gui to change all the settings.
June 9, 2004 at 1:45 pm · Filed under General, Windows
I just got a new PC here at work. I decided to record all of the things I install or change on it:
Firefox
Less
CAPS LOCK switch
Google Toolbar - Firefox does this
Trillian
Sheldon Font
Putty - via installer
xterm-color, sheldon font, x-term style select, alt-space enable, 120 secs keep-alive
gVim
Scite - via installer
Turn on Tab Completion
Etherreal
Modify SendTo to add Notepad and Wordpad
Explorer - Show all files, and hidden, and system files
Visual Studio
Platform SDK
All the service packs…
