Wherein I occasionally rant on various topics including, but not limited to, PHP, Music, and whatever other Topics I find interesting at the moment, including my brain tumor surgery of August 2010.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Webgrind ROCKS

Okay, so I'm a Linux guy through and through, and I'd love nothing more at my day job than to wipe the Doze desktop and throw Gentoo or Debian or FreeBSD or even Fedora on it...

Shoot, I'd even be happy to dual boot the thing.

But my current day job is the kinda job where I can't even surf to my own blog at work, because it's blocked.

So, being stuck with Doze [shudder], I was Oh. My. God. happy to find this gem:

Webgrind

It's kind of like kCacheGrind, only a lot less features and through a browser and dog-slow.

But so what?!

The POINT is, I can actually successfully profile my code with Xdebug for the first time ever on Windows without jumping backwards through flaming hoops!

Now if I could just get JIT debugger client to happen...

Thursday, May 08, 2008

G is smart!

is smart. I mean, is really really smart.
I ask a lot of questions, and often knows the answer.
Of course, sometimes doesn't. Though that often turns out later to be that I just didn't ask the question the right way.
Sometimes gives me a lot of extra information. But that's okay. Sometimes 's extra information teaches me something. And sometimes it's strictly for entertainment value, which is also okay.
And likes multi-color rainbow-y things, which is cool.

Now, I've got just one question for you: Am I talking about Google, or my girlfriend?

Is Google an Artificial Intelligence?

I'm serious here.

Is Google's spidering, indexing, search, and response algorithms, in toto, an Artificial Intelligence?

It doesn't know what I'm supposed to be doing Saturday night, for example.
[Girlfriend interjects] Mother's Day dinner at Indie Cafe


Hmmmm. Now that she's added that, Google does know what I'm supposed to be doing Saturday night!

So clearly Google learns, and learns quickly...

I dunno.

I still think my girlfriend is smarter than Google... But I'm not so sure Google isn't pretty smart.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Solaris vi input mode arrow keys fix

This blog post is not for you to read.

It's for me.

You see, every once in a awhile, I work for a client/employer who uses Solaris, OpenSolaris, Unix, or some other traditional Unix-like OS.

They have their reasons, and they are good ones, and I'm fine with that.

Alas, I then usually waste about an hour of their time (and they pay me for it) to Google for the hack that makes vi (my editor of choice) actually usable from a terminal program (putty, usually).

To wit, the arrow keys in vi do not work in input mode under these OSes.

This blog post is a reminder for ME to know what the heck to do next time this happens.

So here is what I do:
Open up ~/.exrc and type these things:
set t_ku=[control-v][up-arrow]
set t_kd=[control-v][down-arrow]
set t_kr=[control-v][right-arrow]
set t_kl=[control-v][left-arrow]

Then make a symlink from .exrc to .vimrc
ln -s ~/.exrc ~/.vimrc

Finally, alias vi to vim, since this only works for vim:
alias vi=vim

Bonus Tip:
To get vi/vim to use more than ONE LINE when you start up, use:
TERM=putty screen

I believe "screen" is magical pixie dust that gives you a whole screen of line instead of one line, and the TERM stuff obviously tells screen that you need that screen to go to putty.

If "man screen" had been installed, perhaps I would have a better understanding of the magical pixie dust, but so it goes.

:-)