VIM Visual Cheat Sheet

I found some useful tips in this VIM visual cheat sheet. I assume that others may find this as useful as I did. If you don't find it that interesting you either don't know what vim is or you are a vi guru. If you think you are in the latter category then you are mistaken :-).

BOOKS!

I just discovered that two of my favorite books are available in full on Google Books:

Chaos and Fractals - New Frontiers of Science (2nd Edition)

Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen)

Another good one from alt.humor.best-of-usenet

Since we always need more speed...

Subject: Re: Skype and Webcam
From: Jules
Newsgroups: cam.misc

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:39:24 +0100, Andrew Feldhaus wrote:
> > Wikipedia and various other highly dubious sources provide
> > back-of-the-envelope estimates along the lines of:
> >
> > 747 cargo limit: About 130 Tonnes
> > Bluray Disc: 50GB/disc, about 25g per disc
> > Hence about: 260 Petabytes (SI prefix) per plane
> > Flight time: 7 hours or so
> > Total bandwidth: Roughly 10 Terabytes, so 80 Terabits, per second

Bit of a pisser if you get there and find that one of the discs is
knackered and you have to retransmit, though.

Wolverine...

A movie about woodcutting in Alaska... Relatively good FX, blood is thicker than water, beasts have a human side, more or less... Go see it, if there's nothing better you can do. I hope that Star Trek is going to be much better.

Cell Phones and Driving

I don't really have an opinion on cell phone usage while driving. In Vermont there is nothing that would forbid people from using their cell phones as far as I know, although there are some proposals on imposing the use of hands free devices as of this year (2009). They may or may not make it into law, but here's something I found really interesting today:
A lady (that's not to say that women drivers are worse, it just happened to be a female driver) drove by me in the other direction today. Do you know how some people (usually women :))... waaait, just joking!) tend to accompany their speaking on the phone with hand gestures to illustrate their point (as if the other party could actually see them)? That's exactly what the lady was doing. She just took the other hand off the wheel to gesticulate.

So what the possible law would do is to free up the hand holding the cell so it can hold something else. Now you have people doing all these things at the same time: hand gestures, iPod play list set up and paying attention to the discussion on the phone. Here's how I think they should drive: speed up to 50 mph, engage cruise control and hold the right foot hovering slightly over the break pedal just in case. Why the right foot? Well, remember the gesturing hand... you can also use it to nail polish the left foot.

Infinitely Endless

Today I was reviewing the code in a friend's bash script and I found two comments that I found quite interesting:

1. at the end of a loop: 'end of the endless loop'.
2. at another position: 'kill the infinite loop'

Apart from not being able to end something that doesn't end, kill something that lasts forever and the fact that the comments are correctly depicting their purpose, I wonder if there is a a more appropriate word out there that would actually offer a better connection between the theoretical concept of an 'infinite loop' and the practical reality.

Here are some suggestions: indefinitely long loop, vaguely infinite loop, hopefully infinite loop, "maybe it will go forever" loop, infinite loop under normal conditions, Round and Round (Aerosmith), "yo' mama's so big that you run out of gas when you drive around her" loop...


"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. " (Ben Franklin).

Bitch, Pleeze!

Just when I thought SNL was becoming boring they came up with this...