My Favorite Vim Plugins

After a brief affair with another editor, I’m now back to using my beloved Vim again. What’s more, I decided to invest the time I should have put in years ago when I started using it, and learned to do things more efficiently. Besides reading Practical Vim and watching some VimCasts, I went through my list of plugins I collected over the years, removed the ones I wasn’t using, learned about a couple of new ones I didn’t know, and re-learned some of the ones I forgot about.

The Sublime Text Experiment

I’m not easily persuaded to try out a new editor, but since I heard so many great things about Sublime Text, I decided to give it a try. After all, it looked a lot better and smoother than my old and rusty Vim, and I’m a sucker for look & feel. So, I took the free courses on tuts+, and tried it out for a while on my daily tasks. Here are my findings.

Book Review: Wonderful Life with the Elements (Bunpei Yorifuji)

In Wonderful Life with the Elements, the Japanese author (and artist) Bunpei Yorifuji takes you through all the chemical elements in a playful, entertaining, and very graphical way. By representing each element as a cartoon character, mapping chemical features (such as atomic weight, state, special properties, …) onto human properties (body weight, hairstyle, clothes, …), and drawing the resulting characters in different (often humorous) situations, he illustrates the properties of each element, their history, and their use in every day life.

From WordPress to Nanoc

After 7 years of serving my blog/website with WordPress, I thought it was time to try something else. One of my biggest gripes about WordPress (apart from having to hold my breath on each version update) is that writing posts through a web UI isn’t very handy: it’s slow, inconvenient for complicated posts (especially if you’re used to your favorite editor), you can’t write while offline, and the versioning is limited (compared to real versioning systems).

Steve Jobs would not appr o ve

In his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech, Steve Jobs explained how his interest in typography played a fundamental role in creating the first Macintosh computer, and how the beautiful typography set the Mac apart from other personal computers out there. He was obviously passionate about these things, going as far as pixel-perfectionism about fonts and icons. That’s why I was a bit shocked when I started noticing bad kerning (aka keming) in the iOS 5 status bar.

TwitCoop: A Desktop Cage for Twitter Mobile Web

The official Twitter for Mac app gives a great interface for Twitter: lightweight, compact, no bloat, and it looks great. Unfortunately, amongst the hundreds of Twitter clients already existing, I couldn’t find anything similar for Linux or Windows. Instead of creating yet another client (which Twitter doesn’t like anyway), I did a bit of Qt WebKit coding, and created a small desktop client around the (current) Twitter Mobile Web interface.

XMPP Scripting with Sluift

Did you ever want to find out what XMPP clients people in your contact list are using? Do you want to migrate your contact list from one server to another, but don’t want to provide your password to some on-line service to do that? Do you have some XMPP-related task you quickly want to write a script for, but don’t want to deal with complex asynchronous APIs? Well, Sluift may be just the thing you are looking for!

Sluift is a Lua-based script layer on top of the Swiften XMPP library. It provides a simple API to do common XMPP tasks, either interactively (through an XMPP console), or by running a script in batch mode. In this post, we’ll go through some examples of what you can already do with Sluift today.

Retjilp: A Native Auto-Retweet Bot

Since I couldn’t find a bot that automatically retweets statuses using the native Twitter Retweet API (all I found was RSS pipes that prefixed messages with “RT”), I created one myself. Retjilp is a (Ruby) script that logs into Twitter, scans the statuses of the contacts you are following, and retweets the statuses matching specified words. The Swift Twitter feed shows the script in action, retweeting all Swift and XMPP related tags from the Swift developers.

The Myths of Innovation (Scott Berkun)

By taking some of the great past and present innovations off the divine pedestal they have been put on, Scott Berkun illustrates what innovating is really about in his Myths of Innovation. And although the subject sounds negative, this classic by Scott Berkun is strangely empowering, inspires everyone to be innovative, and does all this in the extremely pleasant, entertaining, and easy to read style we’re used to from Berkun. Highly recommended!

More squishy data

After Tobias Markmann told me that he was running into resource limitations with a Swiften-based tool for testing server load, I decided to do a small experiment myself. I created a small benchmarking tool, and ran it through the memory allocation profiler from Apple’s Instruments. It turned out that the combination of TLS and ZLib compression (aka “squishy data”) was causing a much higher memory usage than I would have expected.