My preferred medium to write down notes of any kind has been plain-text for a long time. This feels to me like the digital equivalent of pencil & paper. Mostly…

The big advantage being, that it let’s you focus on what’s important. And that is content! But it has one important challenge. How do you represent section headers, bulleted lists, hyperlinks,… in plain text?

While writing plain text files is quick and easy, sometimes you still want to convert it to a more visually appealing style. Say for example you’d like to incorporate it into a web-page, then converting it to HTML would be nice.

Over the years I’ve dealt with quite a few systems used for plain-text markup. Without a question, the most widely known markup language is HTML. Other’s which come to mind are javadoc, phpdocumentor, ROBOdoc and doxygen. While these are meant to document code, I still count them as markup languages as they have constructs to add style or semantics to the content. All of these are pretty useless as tool to write notes as they are stubbornly assuming you are generating text for code.

About ten years back while writing my own CMS, I needed a way to allow users to markup content. Allowing HTML was not an option because it was hard to edit, and hard to explain for non tech-savvy users. Especially at that time, when the Internet was still something most people considered either “Magic” or the “The Work of The Devil”. I didn’t need much. So I concocted my own markup language, and with not even a one-page introduction, people got productive with it.

A few years later I found what I then considered “The Holy Grail” of markup: And that was markdown. It’s really well designed, and the resulting “source” plain text format is very concise and clean. There’s not a lot of “noise” in the document. It is a perfect candidate for a note-taking format. The only thing that is really missing are tables.

Only recently ( about two years back ) did I come across reST (reStructuredText). It’s been around for quite some time, and I’m surprised I didn’t hear from it earlier. And if I had to sum it up in one word, it would be, without any hesitation: Mature! The “source” you write is, very clean and readable. Some parts (f. ex.: section headings) are even cleaner as in markdown, whereas other areas are not (f. ex.: hyperlinks). But it is much more complete than markdown!

One thing neither markdown nor reST can do very well is interlinking of documents. This is where Sphinx comes in. Sphinx is a document generation system which uses a collection of reST files as input. To completely understand it’s inner workings is not very straight-forward. But easy enough. And it pays off. It generates downright beautiful HTML and PDF (through LaTeX) documents.

In summary I would say that I would in any case prefer reST to anything else. It’s simple for basic cases, but complete enough, when the document starts to grow. Unfortunately I have not yet found convincing parsers for PHP. So in that case I’d go with Markdown Extra. If I needed to write really large documents, I’d consider Sphinx. Primarily because the generated HTML pages have an offline JavaScript search included, and because of the nice default style

the video shows a presentation from Jason Fried from “37Signals” about how he runs his company.

as i’m working for a small internet service provider myself, i found this video very inspiring and a must-see for everybody in the business.

i think that there are a lot of very good points being made, like teleworking, focus on what matters, don’t waste your time on “david vs goliath” battles etc.

i recommend this video to everybody who owns or works for a small web-related company

Source: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1329-my-talk-at-the-business-of-software-conference-september-2008

One thing I have realised is that in the past, developers seemed to care more about clean coding and standards.I have the impression that all this is seriously going down the drain since – let’s name it- the “Broadband Revolution”. Since then about everybody has an Internet connection at home and the number of wannabe web-developers skyrocketed. Now, if you google for JavaScript/HTML/whatever references you do not find one reference, you find hundreds. And about all of them seems to be written by somone who thinks to know better.

Why do these people re-invent the wheel by writing down on their web-space what’s already been written by domain-specialists? Are they trying to show the world just how “good” they really are? Are they looking for recognition on the web that they could not get in real life? Because, frankly, I would not have much respect for the work they do

Back to topic. About standards. Consider the following excerpt:

Note: The latest W3C method to connect an event handler to an event is to use the addEventListener method, similar to Java. However, this is not supported by Internet Explorer, and since Internet Explorer owns 96 percent of the browser market, we can ignore addEventListener.¹

It’s statements like these that drive me up the wall. And it’s one of the first links I got back from google when looking into the ins and outs of event handling in modern browsers. I am all for education and educating new (web-)developers about how things should be done. And this simply is not the way! Stating that you should throw out all the standards, simply because the market leader does not support it is just wrong. With this train of thought, the standards will never be adopted properly. Now this is the special case of Web-Browsers and JavaScript support, but this example easily spans over other areas as well.

Having a text like this in the top google hits surely gives newcomers the wrong idea.

I am honestly curious to see how the web evolves in the next few decades. But maybe I’m just too pessimistic and it will all turn out well. Time will tell!

¹:  http://bucarotechelp.com/design/jseasy/96001603.asp?x=52&y=9&page=2

My first thought was: Ok, most likely many of the projects were written by non IT-professionals who only code “out of their head” without thinking things through at first. Curious as I am, I googled for the very title of this post. And I fell across an article on Linux Today about a study done by the Boston Consulting Group (Also quoted on slashdot). What I found particularly disturbing was the finding that the most part of the interviewees considered themselves as IT-Professionals. Granted, only interviewing less than 600 developers from only one source (sourceforge), is barely representative, and most likely highly biased as well. But it’s an interesting survey nonetheless.

So, why – in the love of $deity – do so many projects written by allegedly IT-Professionals present themselves with very poor coding style and more often than not very poorly designed database schemata? It’s becoming an increasing nuisance to work with these projects. If you want/need to make changes/extensions to the existing code you often need quite a while to get to grips with the logic behind all that exists.

Interestingly though, the stricter the rules of the used programming language/database the better the code, but the less common it is as well in open source projects. This does not mean though that it’s the fault of the programming language. Not at all. Even with a language as flexible as Perl you still can write very sexy code. But I haven’t seen a single Perl script that fit’s that description (though I haven’t inspected many Perl scripts yet in detail).

I would really like to see a study on the demographics of open source software that focusses it’s goal on coding style/standards rather than on the age group / motivations of coders. And it should also pick a representative sample of developers instead of going the lazy route and only querying sourceforge. This would certainly be an interesting project to do

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

About these homes and at the intersections of the roads in this nomadic ‘city’ are the gardens. Each is unique. One may centre around an unusually-shaped stump or an arrangement of stones or a graceful bit of wood. They may contain fragrant herbs or bright flowers or any combination of plants. One notable one has at its heart a bubbling spring of steaming water. Here grow plants with fleshy leaves and exotically-scented flowers, denizens of some warmer clime brought here to delight the mountain-dwellers with their mystery. Often visitors leave gifts in the gardens when they depart, a wooden carving or a graceful pot or perhaps merely an arrangement of bright pebbles. The gardens belong to no one, and all tend them.

Robin Hobb, Assassins Quest.
Great Britain: Harper Voyager, 1998

When rading this passage of this book (which is part of the Farseer Trilogy) I could not help but think about Open Source projects. If you did not had the same thought when reading the text, go read it again. It is a beautiful analogy.

Note: If any directly involved party feels that any copyright claims have been violated by posting this, please leave a comment. I will take this text down if so requested.

With the spreading of Mozilla Thunderbird this has changed drastically however. With enigmail (a mozilla-addon to use GPG with the mail client), things are becoming much easier and accessible. It offers most of the functionalities you wish to see in such a tool. It allows you to create a new private/public key pair, has a simple management tool for keys, and lets you very transparently sign and/or encrypt e-mails.

In my opinion, the main reason why GPG is still a thing for “geeks” or “professionals” is the ignorance (or naiveté) of people about how easy mails can be intercepted. Yesterday I demonstrated somebody this exact fact. And him still being quite computer-literate, he was still baffled that I could show him the text of a mail he sent with his password along the lines (All done with his consent of course). And I do not consider myself a hacker. Just a few minutes of googling, downloading and installing the right tool did it for me. And if I can do this, so can many other people as well. With a little bit more effort, it’s even possible to alter the text of a mail in transit. Needless to say, the emails are stored on somebody else’s server. An this in plain text! Even if the server does support SSL, TLS or whatnot. This only means that the transmission between mail-client and mail-server is secured. Not the storage. And you never know who sit’s behind the screen of that server.

Granted, most of the time, people managing servers like this are most likely geeks themselves, which usually share the concern about security, and thus keep things safe.

Considering this, it can become easy to demonstrate the advantages of mail encryption/signing. And usability is increasing steadily. With the mozilla suit (and thunderbird) now having a user-friendly tool at the ready, people are not yet easily convinced to keep security in mind. Other mail-clients offer easy user-interfaces as well. The KDE-Suite (with KMail and KGPG) had brilliant supoprt for this already a long time ago. And there are more free tools available to make it a user-friendly experience. The Swiss-Army-Knife for a Windows environment would probably be GPGShell. It still resorts to the GPG-Cli application from time-to-time, but it keeps it to a minimum. It also offers easy file-encryption via Windows Explorer shell entries. Another alternative is Evolution, which has built-in supoprt for GPG.

Suffice it to say, there is widespread support for GPG (and PGP) in mail-application across all OS’es. To become more widespread in use, people should be made aware of the risks that are posed by e-mails and how easy it can be made to keep personal information really personal.

It all started with the decision to get some business logic on to the web-pages. After a lot of googling — wait… that did not exist yet. A better term would be “altavistaing” or “lycosing”… — I StumbledUpon a revolutionary way to write code for web pages. PHP! Cool finally no more need of weird Perl syntax…… Haha… Right… moving on…

After even more research, I found one(!) web-provider that supported both PHP and MySQL. Amazing! They even supported MySQL. So I jumped right in. Support was amazing. It seemed to be a smallish company with only a handful of employees. Immediate shell access to the web-server, full control over all that was neede. Brilliant. And all was nice and dandy.

Until the day the shell-access disappeared. What gives?!? Is this legal? Simply changing features of a running contract? I don’t know. /me didn’t read the EULA. Stupid me! Still it seems kind of dubious. With the shell access gone, lots of things became suddenly more complicated. What about cron-tabs? What about MySQL dumps (no phpmyadmin available yet)… need I say more?

And it didn’t stop there. The company grew, migrated a few time to new locations. Every time linked with annoying downtimes of the servers. Which would be (kind of) OK, if the servers on the new location actually worked. After every migration the whole workflow changed. New URLs for server-configuration pages, new overall folder-layout (which broke some ftp-scripts), new server-side software which broke yet some other scripts. The list goes on. Now they migrated twice already (or was it three times… I forgot) and you might hope that after each migration things should run smoother. On the contrary. Server stability is going down the drain. More than one outage per year seems normal. My favourite was one outage where they blamed it on thunderstorms. Right. So there are no UPSs? Hard to beleive. What’s even funnier, is that the thunderstorms stopped. 4 days prior to the phone call!!!! No no… physics does not apply to them! They use quantum singularities as power source and shit. I’m sure of it. It would surely explain a lot.

Analoguous to the previous post, these guys brag about how they are the best and such. Frankly, the ads I’ve seen in cinema are quite nice. But good ads are not everything.

After many years of suffering and bleeding I learned my lesson. Now I am running two dedicated servers, again with shell access (yay… usefulness!) and migrated everything over to those. Even the migration was no fun. The old web-provider changed the URLs of the phpmyadmin-interface again. After a few calls that got sorted out again and I have my database dump of my last site. Great. So I import the dump and what do I get? SYNTAX ERROR! Oh the terror! Well it turned out to be a minor glitch of the mediocre phpmyadmin version they were running, and it was easily fixed with some search&replace. Still, it made me whince.

I am happy that I moved the last remnant and I am free of the clutches of this amazing web-provider. And I am even saving loads of money.

This is not meant to be an explanation of vim configuration file. However, it contains lots of comments, and might prove a good primer/starting-point. Eventually I will also include other modifications I made in my vim-home-folder as they are either used in the vimrc or just plain useful

The .vimrc

" $Id$
"-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

set nocompatible           " Behave like vim and not like vi!

if has("vms")     "{{{ Stuff from stack.nl (see bottom of file)
  set nobackup    " do not keep a backup file, use versions instead
else
   set backup      " keep a backup file
endif

" Switch syntax highlighting on, when the terminal has colors
" Also switch on highlighting the last used search pattern.
if &t_Co > 2 || has("gui_running")
  syntax on
  set hlsearch
endif

" Only do this part when compiled with support for autocommands.
if has("autocmd")

  " Enable file type detection.
  " Use the default filetype settings, so that mail gets 'tw' set to 72,
  " 'cindent' is on in C files, etc.
  " Also load indent files, to automatically do language-dependent indenting.
  filetype plugin indent on

  " Put these in an autocmd group, so that we can delete them easily.
  augroup vimrcEx
  au!

  " For all text files set 'textwidth' to 78 characters.
  autocmd FileType text setlocal textwidth=78

  " When editing a file, always jump to the last known cursor position.
  " Don't do it when the position is invalid or when inside an event handler
  " (happens when dropping a file on gvim).
  autocmd BufReadPost *
    \ if line("'\"") > 0 && line("'\"") <= line("$") |
    \   exe "normal g`\"" |
    \ endif

  augroup END

else

endif " has("autocmd") }}}

"
" VIM 7 Settings
" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
if v:version >= 700
   set cursorline
endif

" Indentation settings
" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
set autoindent                   " always set autoindenting on
set shiftwidth=3                 " Force indentation to be 3 spaces
set tabstop=3                    "          -- idem --
set list                         " EOL, trailing spaces, tabs: show them.
set lcs=tab:>·                   " Tabs are shown as >·
set lcs+=trail:.                 " Trailing spaces are shownas periods
set expandtab                    " always expand tabs to spaces

" Development helpers
" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
set showmatch                    " Show matching braces
   " for ctrl-P and ctrl-N completion, get things from syntax file
   autocmd BufEnter * exec('setlocal complete+=k$VIMRUNTIME/syntax/'.&ft.'.vim')
" Insert LGPL Header
imap <F1> <C-o>:r ~/.vim/licenses/LGPL.h<CR>
" Insert GPL Header
imap <F2> <C-o>:r ~/.vim/licenses/GPL2.h<CR>
" Insert indentation modeline
imap <F12> # vim: set shiftwidth=3 tabstop=3 expandtab ai:<CR>
" Map Meta-Left & Meta-Right to step through the error-list which is also used
" for vimgrep.
map <M-Right> :cn<CR>
map <M-Left>  :np<CR>

" Display
" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
set title                        " display title in X.
set foldcolumn=4                 " display folds
set nowrap                       " Prevent wrapping
colorscheme blackbeauty
set background=dark

" UI Tweaks
" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
" make search results appear in the middle of the screen:
nmap n nzz
nmap N Nzz
nmap * *zz
nmap # #zz
nmap g* g*zz
nmap g# g#zz
nmap <kMinus>  :bprevious<CR>    " Switch to previous buffer
nmap <kPlus>   :bnext<CR>        " Switch to next buffer
nmap <C-s>     :w<CR>
set backspace=indent,eol,start   " allow backspacing over everything in insert mode
set history=50                   " keep 50 lines of command line history
set ruler                        " show the cursor position all the time
set showcmd                      " display incomplete commands
set so=7                         " Keep a 7-lines lookahead when scrolling
set wildmenu                     " Show auto-complete matches
nnoremap Q gq                    " Don't use Ex mode, use Q for formatting

" Print Settings
" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
set printoptions=header:3,number:y,left:10mm,right:10mm,top:10mm,bottom:10mm

" Abbreviations
" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
iab miam Michel Albert <mymail@example.com>

" EOF... sort of  
" good example at http://www.stack.nl/~wjmb/stuff/dotfiles/vimrc.htm
"
" vim: set shiftwidth=3 tabstop=3 expandtab:
" vim: set foldmethod=marker foldmarker={{{,}}} foldenable foldlevel=0:

The .gvimrc

" Things to override for the GTK interface
" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
colorscheme my_inkpot
map <F2> :colorscheme my_inkpot<CR>:set background=dark<CR>
set cmdheight=2                  " How many lines does the command-line occupy?
set mousehide                    " Hide the mouse pointer while typing
set guifont=Monospace\ 12