svn diff in vim

In the category of "How did I live without this?!" tools, I'm late to the party with this vim plugin from Brian Shire of Facebook / APC / PHP fame:



If you use svn, git, cvs or similar, this plugin shows you a "diff" in vim.

I don't know how often I quit vi or open another shell just to do a diff.

Now, I don't have to!

Lumni I Likovski, Cook County Assessor's Office

ADVERTISEMENT: Hire Me

So the other day, I had to go down and file for a home owner's exemption on my house.

I got my little queue ticket #96. They were calling out #32, with 5 or 6 workstations.

I had a half hour, max, to get this done, before I had to be elsewhere.

This did not look good...

Thank God for Lumni I. Likovski, Manager, Taxpayer Exemptions.

He was out in the waiting area, checking for people who didn't need a full-blown computer workstation (such as myself) and doing "triage" to get us the forms we needed, get our questions answered, and get us out of there.

He even cheerfully (and I stress cheerfully) photocopied my Driver's License for me, a requirement to hand in the form.

It's not often in this day and age that you get excellent service/help like this, most especially from government staff.

So I'm dedicating this blog post to LUMNI I LIKOVSKI down that at Cook County. I owe you a beer!

PS
I tried to just send in a comment to his boss using their online form, but it blows up like this, every time I try to submit it:

Database Results Error
Description: The conversion of char data type to smalldatetime data type resulted in an out-of-range smalldatetime value.
Number: -2147217913 (0x80040E07)
Source: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server

Maybe they should hire me to re-do their website? :-)

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...

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.

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.

:-)