Some of you may have noticed the Twitter feed on the right. This is a brand new, albeit late in early adopter terms, addition to my online life. For the longest time, I really wondered what the whole point of Twitter was. People just went on and on about the phenomenon and I never quite got it. Why on earth would anyone be interested in being notified about what I am up to, every moment of my life?
My Vim customization
In my previous post, I mentioned how I migrated back to Vim for my development environment. Vim is fantastic but the default settings may not suit your needs. Given that Vim does not provide a GUI based configuration mechanism, getting it to fit your needs will take a bit of tweaking .VIM files and scavenging Google for tips. This was part of the reason why I stuck to Eclipse for so long.
Anyway, I have finally customized Vim enough to use it full time. Below is a list of my customizations; perhaps it will be of use to you.
TortoiseSVN directory diff
Recently, I tossed out Eclipse for a simpler Vim + TortoiseSVN development environment. I’ve used Eclipse for several years and love the integration. However, the 30 second startup time has always discouraged me from starting it up too often. Not to mention the 100+ MB installation size, excessive memory usage and tedious setup and update process. Eclipse rocks and I miss the environment every day, but I need something faster and more nimble that can adapt to my 10 minute coding sessions.
Move to WordPress.com
Some of you may have noticed that this blog, and my wife’s blog, are now hosted on WordPress.com. I moved since I want to stop depending on my server at home for my web hosting needs. The migration was not too difficult since I was using WordPress for the blogs anyway, but was not as smooth as I hoped.
Turning to Akismet
We live in a world of wasted effort. I get my daily dose of email spam despite some pretty decent filtering. And ever since I started this blog a few months back, I gotten to experience the joys of comment spam first hand.
Automating the Encoder
I recently shared my solution for encoding home videos I record using a DVD camcorder. While the solution helped me understand the encoding process, it was not exactly user friendly in terms of the number of steps involved. Being the automation freak that I am, I have written a Python script that takes care of the entire process in a single step.
AppSnap reviewed on Lifehacker
I just found out that AppSnap was reviewed on Lifehacker. My web server apparently took a beating and was down. Considering I was travelling for most of today, I just got to fixing it. Hopefully, it fares better now that I’ve tweaked some settings.
I’m a regular reader and fan of Lifehacker and am very happy to see AppSnap on their front page. Thanks to Gina Trapani and the Lifehacker gang for their show of support. The extra eyes and feedback will surely help make AppSnap more useful to people out there.
Unreasonable Firefox memory usage
I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 recently and was impressed like most other folks. Things were fine until I started noticing excessive hard disk activity as well as sluggish performance and intermittant hangs.
Session cookies rejected by Internet Explorer
Recently, I ran into a problem with an image gallery web application I am writing in PHP. Throughout development, which was done on my Windows laptop using XAMPP, everything worked perfectly fine, both on Firefox as well as Internet Explorer.
As soon as I deployed my application on my Linux server, IE suddenly stopped accepting my session cookies. The weird thing was that Firefox continued to work perfectly fine.
Py2Exe: Zlib not available
Recently, I released ClearAxis, a simple application that allows you to configure the Araxis Merge utility as the default diff tool within Rational ClearCase. The ClearCase diff tool is rather primitive and could really use some replacing.
