Vim

In the past, I have written about my contempt for Vim, but my attitude has changed, as of today. DrSmall helped me on the path to Vim after I mentioned that I had added syntax highlighting to Nano.

On my re-moving to Arch, I decided I should use more CLI-based applications. Since I had a misunderstanding with Vim (it’s quite intimidating…), I decided I’d use Nano. On discovery (afaik) that I could not make the pressing of the tab key print four spaces, and not a tabstop, I knew I needed to find another CLI editor or just stay with Geany. I have been wanting to try Vim for a while now, but everytime I (lazily, without reading the manual) tried to use it it seem to do something really odd and I gave up on it. Anyways, DrSmall recommended that I try Vimtutor.

After vimtutor taught me that Vim wasn’t as difficult as I’d imagined, I decided to try some things I normally do. Vim retained my 2 favorite Nano shortcuts,
Ctrl-K (cut a line) and Ctrl-U (paste a cut line), albeit in the forms of “dd” and “p”. Syntax highlighting worked from the get go, and my code looks cleaner in Vim’s font selection. I’ve done some work on Grubbot, and now I’m pretty sure Vim is the right editor for me

On a sort-of related subject, what is with WordPress’s new interface? The editor I’m typing this on right now is complete and utter crap. Why is the sidebar of selections bigger than the box I ues to type in the actual blog post??

WTF Youtube

What’s with the new widescreen resolution? Now videos look worse, and 99.999999% of videos are in the 4:3 aspect ratio. Why can’t they determine that the video isn’t in 4:3 and automatically make it widescreen instead of all of them?

Linux Fanboys

Lately, Linux fanboys have been really annoying me. If you’ve ever used Linux and posted on message boards, IRC, blogs, or any other form of media you might know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the guys that think MS is all bad, for no good reason.

First order of business: Microsoft is not evil. They are not out to get you. They will not hurt you, attack you, or anything else like that. Sure, they’ve had some questionable business practices. Guess what? OTHER COMPANIES HAVE THEM TOO.

When you want to make money, you’re not going to hold the door open for your competitors or be kind to them. You’re trying to steal money away from them so you can have it, as is the basis of for-profit businesses. It’s not Microsoft’s fault they got successful.

They hold about 90% of the market share of operating systems, last time I checked. I saw somebody questioning the KDE project porting KDE to Windows today, almost like it was a bad thing.  If you want a mass market of people to use your product you don’t make it Linux only. That almost seems like consumer lock in.

I don’t get why people whine when companies don’t make Linux versions of software. They say that many, many people want specific software to be ported to Linux. 100,000 people may seem like a lot of people to you, but the truth is, it isn’t. In the larger picture of things, there are many more customers that don’t care if X or Y is ported to Linux.

If you want companies to start porting things to Linux, it’s time to start introducing more people to it. Rally in the streets (if you really care that much about Operating Systems). It really irks me when people write titles like “MS market share goes down” or “Year of the Linux Desktop”. Guess what? According to this site, Windows has a worldwide market share of 90.46%, and Linux has a whopping total of 0.71%. THAT ISN’T EVEN 1%. Sorry to say it so bluntly guys, but Windows isn’t going away any time soon. I’m willing to bet Linux will disappear before Windows does, because people will realize it’s a hopeless cause and give up on Desktop Linux.

Though, I must say, defacing company names (M$, Microsuck, internet exploder, etc) isn’t going to get you anywhere. I don’t get what’s so fun about typing it that way. It’s not rebellious, it’s not clever, witty, or funny. It’s just stupid. I’m starting to believe the amount of company defacing used in a post is directly proportional to how ignorant the author is.

I may add more to this later..

Proprietary software isn’t evil

I don’t know what’s up with Linux users lately, but today someone tried to tell me, because I mentioned using the BSD License, that I should be using the GPL license. The reasoning being that the BSD License allows others to edit your software and then release it under a proprietary license. That’s the reason I was using the BSD License in the first place. I really don’t care if someone releases a proprietary version of my work.

There is nothing inherently evil about proprietary software. Sure, it can be “abused”, like all things. Companies hold software “hostage”, by “forcing” you to upgrade or somehow paying more money to them. Companies have you pay for software because they are interested in making money. They are a business, first and foremost. There is nothing wrong with making money, even in excess.

Sure, MS Office 2007 may cost a pretty penny, but there are plenty of docx converters out there anyways. Besides – I’m pretty much in love with Office 2007 and use it at school whenever I can (I don’t own a copy at home, unfortunately). MS may have overpriced it, but they deserve money for it.

Proprietary software is beneficial for several types of things – games,  military software, and generally, other expensive things. Compare lincity NG to Simcity 4000. There’s no competition, Simcity 4000 wins, hands down. In order for some genres of games to be good, they need a corporate backing. They need tens or hundreds of programmers and millions of dollars – not 3 guys that live in their mother’s basement. I seriously doubt you’ll ever see an open source alternative to GTA4 or the Sims 2.

I’ve never gotten how OSS is a viable market option. How do you sell software when someone can just take said software and release it for free? Makes no sense to me. You have to make your software non-reproducable order to make money. Sure, one could argue that you could just pirate said software, however, that is illegal, which is not the case for OSS software

Proprietary software will not eat, kill, or rape your children, despite what RMS wants you to believe. It may take a nice chunk out of your wallet, but it’s not evil. End of story.

Rant: complex config files

Lately, I’ve been looking at some cli linux apps. I just don’t get why they have to make config files overly complex for no good reason.

When it feels like I’m writing code (and in some cases I am), I usually stop using that app because I’m not supposed to be writing code in order to use the app.  Seriously. You prepackage the app for me, I expect the work required to set up your app to be little to none. Yet, it’s unnecessarily difficult

As if that weren’t bad enough, sometimes apps don’t include pre-setup (”change values yourself” type thing) config files, so you have to lookup vague howtos or man pages (I HATE man pages). Or, they include pre-setup values, but they aren’t commented.

This is what I found in my irssi config file :
fe-text” = { actlist_sort = “refnum”; };

What in the hell does that mean?!? No comments. Nothing. Sadly it seems some apps still need some heavy duty work on user friendliness.  *sigh*

Google adsense

Sadly, Google adsense cancelled my account. I’m not sure why – probably some unexplained click fraud (they didn’t provide any details; apparently it’s to protect their proprietary detection system… ). I’m not sure if I’m going to get my $130 check or not – but I had alot of plans for that..

Overall, I’m pretty disappointed and I don’t really plan to use google adsense ever again. My good friend Scaredpoet has pointed me to what seems like a friendlier – and better service: Project wonderful. I’ll be sure to check it out more, and not let companies control any cash of mine unless I’m absolutely sure I’ll get it.

An excellent company

I’ve been thinking of switching to a VPS host lately. Off of a friend’s recommendation, I took a look at Cheapvps.

I was thinking of going with debian as an os, but wasn’t sure of the version (easily distro-upgraded though). So, I asked on the forums. And wow, the cheapvps website was updated to include version numbers specifically because of that thread

Just goes to show you that there still are companies out there that care about customers . Hostgator is too big to get personal with the staff

dot directories in my home directory

I’m getting sick of all these “dot” folders in my home directory. And even moreso, of some programs not even use .directories, but instead .programname_file1, .programname_file2 (For example: .bash_history, .bashrc, etc). I’m glad people are trying to incorporate moving all dot-folders into ~/.config, via the open desktop standards.

Also, dot-folders need to make more sense. why is .mozilla for firefox, but .mozilla-thunderbird for Thunderbird?? It’s just a gigantic mess.
I made a few symlinks for this, but the dot-folders still exist. For example, ~/.mozilla –> ~/.config/firefox. You can do this with the following command :

ln -s reallocation newlocation

For my example above, this would be :

ln -s ~/.mozilla ~/.config/firefox

Dillo Idiocy

About a week ago, I took dillo for a test run. It was good, however on the wikipedia article on dillo, I discovered several stupid things :

• Since version 0.8.6, dillo has gotten rid of CSS support
• There exists a FLTK port of Dillo, however it is being held hostage.

Good job. The only reason Dillo is even usable is because of it’s miniscule support for CSS. It was plenty leightweight with CSS support anyways.

Also, why keep the version people want away from them? They state that it’s being held until companies support Dillo more. I wouldn’t support Dillo if I had the choice now.

Dillo also failed at gmail. It’s totally missing https support, though that can be enabled by changing a source file and recompiling (WTF??, why is that not a settings option???). Though the https support is alpha-quality, apparently.

I don’t mind them only providing support for valid documents, but not keeping up with the modern web doesn’t make me delighted to use that browser. Sure, if you have a 486 it could be great (Well, somehow I doubt a 486 could even run Wmii correctly, and there is no CLI version of dillo).

If I knew anything about C, I’d program a bit on this web browser. There are a lot of things it could do to become better. I’d rate it as the web browser of the year for supporting only standard-compliant pages, but these issues are just too stupid to forgive.

grubbn.org

If you remember grubbn.com and happen to be reading this blog post by coincidence, you should know, a long time ago hostgator fscked us over and we had to get rid of grubbn.com, then we switched to grahamotte.com, due to xhhux being generous. Now we host on grubbn.org, again due to xhhux’s generosity