Vim and Vimperator

Recently I’ve made the transition to VI Improved (Vim) and uninstalled jEdit, an editor I’ve been very happy with so far for all my programming tasks.

Even though Vim is as old as myself it is capable of doing almost anything when editing text. A lot of hardcore programmers swear to the tool and the rest use Emacs. These editors make the foundation of the editor war. One of the strengths of Vim is that it runs on any terminal with or without a GUI which makes it extremely light-weight and an excellent option for remote editing. Another great advantage is that because of the lack of GUI everything is possible to do with the keyboard. The learning curve is a bit steep but when you get the hang of it your editing speed will increase. The more I use Vim, the less I have to move my mouse (maybe I am a bit lazy).
Now that I have used Vim for some time and come to love it I have found a plugin for firefox which makes browsing simulate Vim. It goes by the name Vimperator

follow links by title or number

Vimperator is of course as Vim itself extendible so you can map all kinds of shortcuts and special behavior to your sites. Try it out!
My boss enjoyed it a lot as well – points for me right there.

JabRef

Today I installed a citation/reference manager called JabRef for my project.

JabRef reference manager

It is an excellent tool that makes me able to keep track on all of my articles at the same time as well as export the lists to various formats, including HTML, which is a feature I find to be quite brilliant. Also (I haven’t tried this yet) I should be able to export it to OpenOffice which will probably save me a lot of time and tedious work. Of course this is because I should have made a lot of work today searching for more litterature and reading, but this is simply more fun I think. Kind of useful though also an excellent waste of time – I am working on my skills as a master procrastinator!

Subversion

I’ve just managed to install the file versioning system, Subversion, for my project that I am working on over summer. When I wrote my bachelor’s project I ended up being seriously confused with several versions of each and every file on different FTP servers, laptops and my stationary PC. Not being able to tell which version that is the most recent is such an annoyance and time-consumer, that I vowed to figure something out for next time. Well, the solution is simple.

• sudo apt-get install subversion

Subversion

The great advantage of having this program is that it transparently stores all versions of your files so that you don’t have to be afraid to overwrite anything. Also if properly set up it allows you to work at multiple computers easily and pain free by synchronizing the copies of the project at a central site. You simply do:

• svn checkout (or: svn update)
• edit your files
• svn commit

Almost sound too great to be true? Try it out!

eggdrop IRC bot

dotascript is taking on new heights! For some time I’ve been thinking about restructuring our dotascript and possible simplifying it by using a bot. But the entire process of installing and configuring a bot, learning Tcl and finding a host for the bot have felt a bit overwhelming, so I’ve postponed it several times. But now that my exams are over I think I can find the time. I will take it stepwise and hopefully with perseverance I will have solved all my issues. Don’t worry – be happy!

I am now well on my way having read a couple of Tcl tutorials and installed and compiled the eggdrop bot.

Here is my cookbook:

• download eggdrop
• checkout ‘troubleshooting make’
• sudo ./configure
• sudo make configure
• sudo make
• sudo make install
• cd ~/eggdrop
• eggdrop -m config-file
• chmod u+x config-file
• (next time: ./config-file)
• /msg bot hello (and follow instructions)
• telnet localhost port
• .chanset #channel need-key putserv “JOIN #channel password”
• in config-file:
  bind EVNT -|- init-server init:server
  proc init:server {event} {
  global botnick
  putquick “PRIVMSG Q@Cserve.quakenet.org :AUTH “
  putquick “MODE $::botnick +x”
  }

Wow, that was a lot but I am happy that I got it working in just one evening. Now I just need to write my Tcl scripts.
Dotascript here we go!

eggheads

UPDATE:
I love LAN. I have spent much of my time scripting the dota bot and finishing dotascript lite.
I am happy to announce that I have now finished the bot. It should run with most of the required features, such as addall, removeall and poweradd.. It even has support for both game types – hamachi and garena. The bot is written in Tcl, a very oldschool programming language while dotascript lite (the client side script) has been written for mIRC in mIRC’s own scripting language and for Xchat in Python. It has been a good experience. Now I only need to find a host for the bot so I can join in on the fun with my client .

Negligence

Wow, its been a long time since last time. It is not because I haven’t done anything interesting, rather the opposite, I feel I have been a busy bee. Thanks to my good friend Google Calendar I can summarise May 2009 like this:

• 1. – 31 km run
• 2. – Brewing combined with Magic showdown among old friends.
• 3. – My nephew’s 3. birthday
• 9. – Vinhejk
• 12. – 18 km run around Dyrehaven
• 19. – exam in Statistical Planning of Experiments
• 22. – my own birthday
• 24. – Copenhagen Marathon
• 2nd of June – exam in Molecular Biotechnology

Starcraft

and a lot of Starcraft casting from gomtv with some friends from the dorm and some physiotherapy (for my shin splints and lower back).