journal for 2004-01-28
stupid vim tricks
Persuant to my goal of Doing Stuff, I picked off one item from my to do list. I wrote a little Vim script that hooks into the file-writing event and refuses to let you write a *.pl file if it throws an error when passed to “perl -c”.
It’s actually pretty darn cool. I’ll turn it into a plugin, I think, and then put it on vim.org; I also might do a little work to make it, well, better. I’ve put out a call for other stupid quests to help me learn more Vim stuff.
more work perl
The stink of doom is heavy in the air at work. Heavy.
To distract myself, I did a bit more CGI::Application and TT2 work today. I feel good about it.
I threw together a little calendar generator to display a yearly calendar and show where the fiscal periods break. It’s teeny and very easy to refactor. Wow, I mean. This is good stuff.
Every time I make a minor breakthrough in this stuff, I start to realize that until that point I’ve been a real chump. I wonder how long before I stop feeling that way. Or, at least, before other people stop thinking I’m a real chump. It’d be nice to have a little meter in my Dock showing the ratio of people whose opinion I trust to people who think I’m a chump. It’s not so much that I’m concerned what people think (although, hey, I am) but that they’re probably more objective than I am.
misc
On the way home, I stopped and picked up chromatic’s Extreme Programming Pocket Guide. So far, it looks good. Its linearity should make it much easier to consume than some of the wikis, and also easier to show to my coworkers, who are less familiar with the ideas of XP.
I’m already working on the ORA AppleScript book. So far, so good. I like the fact that the author is very honest about the fact that AppleScript is a mediocre language with mediocre documentation. This makes me hopeful that the book will continue to be honest and give me useful solutions to the problems that always crop up in these obnoxious proprietary languages.
Gloria and I watched Dirty Harry tonight. She gave me the DVD set of all the Harry Calahan movies for Christmas, so we’ll work our way through them slowly. The first was fun, and I expect at least a few of the remaining ones to be, too.