I suspect the ultimate vim keyboard is the Happy Hacking Professional 2. The Control key placement is good for vim, tmux, and screen, and the removal of uncessary arrow and function keys appeals to me. However, it's $300, so I wondered if it's possible to hack the keyboard I already own into being a little bit more vim-friendly.
Swapping Modifier Keys
The position of Control sucks. Fortunately, Apple gives us the ability to swap modifier keys around with no hacking at all.
vim-powerline by Kim Silkebækken is a great plugin, but it's a little bit tricky to get it looking right in Mac OS. I've tested it in both Snow Leopard and Lion and figured out how to get it working nicely.
A friend of mine had visited an office where the employees used tmux and vim to edit Ruby projects. He wanted to know why people would work with the console version of vim, considering the loss of the convenience of mouse input.
iOS 5 redeems iOS development in my eyes through several new features. There are Objective-C changes, but also new APIs that make common tasks a lot easier. When Apple released the new SDK, I created a blank project to see what fundamental project organisation changes had been made, and the only major thing I noticed was the addition of Storyboards.
Unfortunately, Storyboards are not compatible with iOS 4. It may be possible to create a fork of a project with iOS 4 support that has a different UI, or to somehow conditionally use Storyboards. However, we all know how much hand-coded interface development is required for real iOS projects, so I can't see myself using Storyboards.
When I started programming there was a real ‘if it ain’t broke…’ mentality. At least, I think there was — this was in the 90s and I connected to the community through magazines, computer shops, and public domain disks (that’s disks with a ‘k’, as in floppy diskettes). I learned a lot of BASIC derivatives from magazines, and eventually picked up some books on C. Then I heard about K&R C at university and flipped through a copy at the library. I think one of my friends bought a copy, and I was envious because I couldn’t afford it at the time.
Then later on I started playing with Ruby, and there seemed to be a huge amount of experimentation and creativity within the community. I dimly recall trying to work my way through Japanese documentation and giving up, but I came back to it a few years later when a lot of English–speaking developers had jumped aboard. The creativity in the Ruby community seemed to solidify when _why became well known and cartoon foxes and meta–programming were everywhere.
At dConstruct 2011, Don Norman gave a talk entitled Emotional Design for the World of Objects in which he said Google’s main product is us and the service they sell is advertising. The services Google make aren't just a way of getting eyes on adverts, but a way of gathering information about us to improve advertisement targeting. If this is true, where is the evidence? And what does it mean for social products like Google+?
It’s now possible to link Google accounts together, which can make the awkward necessity of using several Google accounts more manageable. I have Google Apps accounts for work and personal use, as well as an obligatory Gmail account for services the Apps accounts can’t yet access. I’ve linked these together to make it easier to switch between them. Does this mean I’m now represented as one person internally within Google?
1Password works so well because it isn't just a security product, but it changes the way we deal with with website logins. That is, we do things more securely and more easily when 1Password is around.- Looking ahead in security, AgileBits
I currently have 258 unique passwords. I'm not addicted to creating accounts on web services; I have multiple identities as a result of separating personal and professional concerns. Memorising 200+ unique passwords is never going to happen, so naturally I use a password manager.
stextile (License: MIT, npm: stextile) is a Textile parser for JavaScript. The lack of a good Textile implementation held me back from developing Pop. While researching the project I found some amazing Textile implementations. Possibly my favourite is RedCloth, which I remember from back when _why rewrote it with Ragel.
As I was desperate for something that would parse my articles, I created a straightforward parser using regular expressions. I wrote tests as I went so it wasn’t too painful.
Pop (GitHub: alexyoung / pop, License: MIT, npm: pop) is my attempt at building something largely compatible with Jekyll that satisfies my own requirements.
I have an axe to grind with web app deployment. I’ve never been totally happy with any solution, and almost everything I’ve tried has let me down repeatedly.
This is where a programmer typically sees a problem and creates a project to solve it. And this is where it all starts to go wrong.
