Adam Monsen

I stopped by OSCON to attend two tutorials this year. The first was Advanced Vim Scripting, led by Steve Oualline (sitting in for Damian Conway). I was sad to miss The Damian, but Steve is a decent lecturer and boasts endless knowledge of the Vim editor. I enjoyed Steve’s rapid-fire pace and attention to detail. I also grilled him fairly heavily and he aced all my questions.

Lessons learned:

• additional C syntax highlighting goodies are documented in :help c.vim. For instance, to make trailing whitespace and space before a tab character stand out, add let g:c_space_errors = 1 to your .vimrc
• using functions and “autocmd FileType” lines is a fine way to customize language-specific settings in your .vimrc
• type CTRL-W ] on a C symbol name to open up the corresponding declaration in a new window
• TextMate snippets-like template fill-in is possible using a plugin
• :vimgrep is cool

I was also inspired to dig into some other C navigation settings. Here’s a quick mini-HOWTO:

1. install source code tools: sudo yum install cscope ctags (on my Fedora 7 system)
2. Generate indexes for the current project: ctags -R && cscope-indexer -v -r
3. in normal mode, "kick the tires":
   1. find references of symbol under cursor: :cscope find s <cword>
   2. find callers of function under cursor: :cscope find c <cword>
   3. find functions called by function under cursor: :cscope find d <cword>
   4. when editing a header, find files which use it: :cscope find i %

I also happened upon Kana's blog, and got more ideas from there (thanks, Kana!):

• use fold markers to clean up plain text files (see my .vimrc linked at end of post)
• use 'noequalalways' setting to prevent split window automatic resizing
• use local function definition and calls to prevent namespace pollution (see my .vimrc)

Other sundries:

• Vim script #453 provides indispensable macros for editing HTML/XHTML
• I've also recently been using VimOutliner for all kinds of lists. Thanks Fordor for that tip!
• Next step: omni completion!

My ~/.vimrc

• Syntax-highlighted version
• Plain text version

I also attended A Taste of Haskell. In a nutshell: Yikes. Larry Wall said it best: "I think Haskell is easy. I've learned it three times already!"

I noticed the at Whirlyball article on Wikipedia had no mention that the scoop used by players is actually a Trac Ball racquet. In fact, there was no Trac Ball article until about five minutes ago!

This is history in the making, folks.

Unless AdBlock is filtering them or you only subscribe to my RSS feed, you’ll now see a “skyscraper” of text-based supposedly targetted ads in the right-hand column.

The WordPress theme I switched to had a nice template for ads so I thought I’d give it a shot and see if I could offset the cost of hosting.

Now’s your chance to let me know what you think. Get rid of ‘em? Don’t care? Good for me? Let me know.

So far the targetting seems pretty crappy, so I guess I need to write more posts about stuff that I like!

What is sleep? It’s when you rest. Rejuvinate. Take a break. But in a special, apparently irreplaceable way.

Why do we sleep? There are lots of theories, but it appears we still haven’t figured this mystery out.

It seems that one “researcher” knows what happens when we sleep.