Category: Geekery

In computer terms, I came out ahead.

I bought a 200Gb hard drive ($141 with a $40 mail in rebate) and a USB external enclosure ($15). The idea was that I would have a hard drive that I could use as a backup for the 80Gb drive on the server, and also have some semi-portable storage so I could give Kodak back the 200Gb firewire drive I sort-of appropriated from them.
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You know what would be cool?

You know what would be cool? If there was a Mozilla plug-in where I could click a button on any text field and it would pop up my favourite text editor (in my case, vim, a graphical vi clone) to edit the text field, instead of using the built-in editor.

The main reason I’d like to use my own editor is that the built-in editor is too mouse-intensive. I like vi because I can navigate with home-row keys.

The other reason is that I’m continually hitting vi command keys, which does entirely the wrong thing in Mozilla.

:wq

Is that so hard?

I have an iPod. It stores 20Gb of music. I also have about 80Gb of music on my hard drive. All I want is a way to put certain select music on the iPod, and then fill the rest with random music selected from that hard drive. Ok, as an added complication, the hard drive lives on a Linux box, and is NFS mounted on the Mac that drives the iPod. That shouldn’t matter, should it? It’s a fast network link (100Mbps) and goes through a switch instead of a hub.
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Cause and Effect

I’m listening to two guys in the next cubicle discuss boolean logic in our product. I’m innately interested in this topic, because I wrote the logic engine. The two guys talking are the guy responsible for presenting the choices to the user and generating the appropriate XML, and the guy responsible for taking the XML after it has been transmitted to the remote sites and stuffing the values into the database so that my logic engine can use that information. Two computer scientists, probably with degrees in computer science, discussing something that is at the very core of computer science. And like everybody else in this office except me, they’re getting it wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. And I’m wondering if I’m going to have to run over there and smack one or both of them until they get it right.
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