Tao of the Machine

On an unfamiliar system, keybindings are your worst enemy

Or maybe your first enemy. I’m just back from a very frustrating exercise on the Mac. You see, ideally I would like to use the Mac for my personal projects, and the Windows box for work. Turning the Mac into my personal hacking platform doesn’t work so well though if it’s so much work to get basic things done.

What am I complaining about this time? Just the fact that Mac software has some keybindings that I’m not used to. I want to edit Python code. That doesn’t seem so difficult, right? So I use vim, since that’s what I use on Windows. I don’t want to use the Terminal version because it has problems of its own, so I use this gvim build for Jaguar. Most keys work as expected, except for Shift-Tab, which happens to be crucial, because that is what I am used to use to dedent a line. I have been trying to remap Shift-Tab, asking questions on newsgroups, etc, to no avail. Learning a new key combination would be an option if the Windows box wasn’t around.

So I tried different editors. I downloaded three: AlphaTk, BBEdit Lite, and TextForge. Unfortunately, all of these seem to have peculiar mappings for Home and End (although this is probably common on the Mac): they jump to the beginning and the end of the document, rather than the line. I’m sure some of these editors let you rebind keys, but right now I really don’t want to worry about that, I just want to edit without running into problems every second keystroke.

Back to vim again. Maybe it helps if I copy my Windows .vimrc verbatim and use it on the Mac? After all, there are no Windows-specific commands in it. So that should work. Wrong. After doing this, vim didn’t even start anymore.

So I try to edit the .vimrc file in Terminal, using vi. More fun: it doesn’t tell me what mode I’m in, nor does i (which should get you into insert mode) seem to do anything. Isn’t it great? Oh, and Home and End don’t work in Terminal either, making editing command lines a joyous adventure.

I’m done with the Mac for now. I’ll be back when I have a week to spare, or something.

If you are contacted by National Check Control...

…check out these sites first:

• Credit Info Center Discussion Board;
• The Elizabethton Star
• Having trouble with National Check Control?
• Ademi & O’Reilly LLP

These people contact you, claiming that you have unpaid checks and threatening to prosecute. We know now from first-hand experience. The checks may or may not be real; either way, NNC is unwilling (and, I suspect, unable) to give you details about them, much less send you copies of the checks. They also don’t want to send you a certified letter, as they are legally obliged to do. What they are willing to do is threaten you and act in a very rude demeanor, making you out for a criminal. Because of their conduct, they have already been sued. More info on the aforementioned sites.

Keep this name in mind, it seems they are on a roll lately, and that they prey on people with bad credit.

A Python puzzle

>>> class A(object):
...   InstCount = 0
...   def __init__(self):
...     self.__class__.InstCount += 1
...
>>> class B(A): pass 
...
>>> a1=A()
>>> a2=A()
>>> b1=B()
>>> b2=B()
>>> B.InstCount 
4
>>> A.InstCount 
2

Learning C#, part 1

That’s right, currently I am learning C#, for work purposes. (Before you smirk, let me point out that last year I spent 99% of my work time in Python. :-)

Currently I’m not impressed. I’ll get over it, most likely. It’s just that I am not used to low-level programming languages anymore. After all, I left this type of language (compiled, statically typed, etc) years ago in favor of Python.

Quite a few C# constructs are very un-Pythonesque, and I am having a hard time adapting. Pointers are a thing of the past? Not so in this language. They’re back with a vengeance, and so are references, and clever C tricks with “pointers are arrays are pointers”. I get a bit queasy when I see objects and pointer arithmetic being mixed.
I have more gripes, but realizing how little I know about the language at this point, I would probably only be demonstrating my ignorance. :)

I hear that Python for .NET will be difficult to write, because the virtual machine (or whatever it’s called for .NET) doesn’t support dynamic languages well. True or not, it would be interesting to write Python and generate Intermediate Language.

Why private methods don't make sense in a dynamic language

>>> class Bamboozle:
	def public(self):
		print "I am a public method!"
	def __private(self):
		print "I am a private method!"
	def foo(self):
		self.public()
		self.__private()
	def bar(self):
		return self.__private
	
>>> b = Bamboozle()
>>> b.public()
I am a public method!
>>> b.__private()  # cannot be called like this
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#14>", line 1, in ?
    b.__private()
AttributeError: Bamboozle instance has no attribute '__private'
>>> b.foo()
I am a public method!
I am a private method!
>>> f = b.bar()
>>> f()  # ta-da!
I am a private method!
>>> 

Kaa 0.9 available for download

See the download section.

What’s new since 0.8?

• New buttons: code, blockquote
• An RSS file can now (optionally) be generated
• Error message dialog with traceback (old version just printed the error in a console window)
• Improved category handling (renaming, deleting)
• Better HTML/embedded code renderer (taken from Firedrop)
• Textile format is now supported
• Some small bugfixes, e.g. main window now expands correctly (patch by David LeBlanc); archive method now defaults to “e:7”; when a new blog is created, it is opened immediately; front page filename can be set; etc.

Enjoy. Please send bug reports, comments, etc, to kaa at zephyrfalcon.org.

Test, test

This is supposed to be a Textile entry. Let’s see if it works.

Textile has three important benefits over regular HTML formatting:
# it’s easy to read.
# it’s easy to read.
# there is no number three.

In other words, you can now use Textile in Kaa. It’s really easy too: if an entry’s first line consists of a single #, then that entry is considered to be in Textile format, and will be treated accordingly. Kudos to Mark and Dean (visit this last link to see how it works).

Expect the official 0.9 release Real Soon Now.