It comes in handy to have different filetypes appear differently in your text editor. Perhaps you want tabs turned into spaces automatically in all C files, but you don’t want that to happen in Makefiles, where the tab character is necessary. Perhaps you like to do python coding with a black foreground, and write a text file with a white foreground. Maybe you want html code to have 100 characters per line but have a text file wrap at 80 characters. You get the idea.

Filetype detection is actually not very hard to do with Vim, even though the documentation might you scratching your head about how to do it. Luckily, I’m here to explain it via examples. :)

First of all, make sure these two lines are anywhere in your vimrc:

filetype on
filetype plugin on

This will turn on the filetype detection.

Second of all, create the directory ~/.vimrc/ftplugin

In that directory, add the file, [file-type-name].vim where [file-type-name] is the name of the filetype you are customizing. For instance, the customization for C files would be c.vim; python files, python.vim, etc. In Ubuntu 9.04, you can find a list of supported filetypes in /usr/share/vim/vim72/ftplugin.

In the file you just created, add the customization options what you want. When you open a new file, Vim will automatically detect the filetype (its pretty good at this) and apply the settings you specified. Use ’setl’ instead of ’set’ so the customizations only apply to the correct file. For example, here is my file for C text files.
custom C settings file, c.vim

" File: ~/.vim/ftplugin/c.vim
 
color default     "use the default colorscheme
setl textwidth=80   "80 character lines
setl nowrap           "don't wrap lines at the end
setl cindent           "use C style indents
setl sw=4        "Use 4 space tabs

See, simple as that. You’ll need a different file for each filetype you want custom settings for. Now you know how to have each filetype do its own thing!

Here it is for your evaluation:

Apparently it is a remix taken from an interview with William Shatner as an “Extra Feature” on a Star Trek Movie DVD.

These days, I use xfce more than I use gnome, and I decided to write a stock ticker applet like the one that was removed from Gnome a couple years ago.

Here it is in action:

Planet users: click here to see it
And, a closeup screenshot:

Its implemented in C, and uses libcurl to access the Yahoo! Finance API, and uses Clutter to perform the animation. It requires an active internet connection (of course) in order to retrieve the data. All in all, I really liked the mechanisms Xfce provides for implementing panel plugins, especially when compared to gnome-panel. The plugin is [of course] licensed under the GPL. It is only to be used as a rough estimate of what the price is. Price accuracy is not guaranteed in any way. If any artist out there has some open-source financial icons to donate to the project, make sure to hit me up.

So, if you use Xfce and are interested in the stock ticker applet, grab the source from here for now. I’ll be putting it up on the xfce-goodies svn soon, once I get my account there working.

Its still “pretty alpha”, meaning I just got it working, but I plan on improving it to the point that its easily usable, and packaging it into a deb so that people can install it easily. There are also a few things I still want to add, like adjustable width of the plugin and selecting which way the text scrolls, but those should be coming down the pipes soon. Buy low, sell high, and enjoy my ticker program. :D

High-end logic analyzers can process data on the GHz level, and cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Luckily, companies have come out with logic analyzers that are a lot cheaper, and work well for pretty much any hobbyist or robotics project you want to do. These cheaper devices typically hook up to USB on computer, and need a program on a computer to run. Saleae released a 8 channel, 24Mhz USB Logic Analyzer for $150 a while ago, along with a Windows program to run it. They promised that equal support for Mac and Linux was coming down the tubes, and I’m happy that they are delivering. The SDK came out a while ago, and they just released an initial program, that only still lacks a few [albeit critical] features that are coming out in the next release, like working pattern triggering.

Here’s a screenshot of the program in action (get the alpha program here):

As you can see if you look closely, its just a simulation ( I don’t have the device yet ), but it looks like it has everything I would want out of a $150 logic analyzer. Also, the guys at Sparkfun seem to like it enough to sell it, another good mark in my book. I’ll be buying a device from here soon! Thanks for the Linux support Salhttp://www.saleae.com/logic/eae. :-)

Here’s how I customized my signature in Thunderbird to auto-rotate fortunes.

First of all, I wrote a short script:

#!/bin/sh
NAME="<big>Kevin DuBois</big>"
EMAIL="kdub432@gmail.com"
FORTUNE="<small><em>"`/usr/games/fortune -n 80 -s`"</em></small>"
echo <html><body>"${NAME}${EMAIL}${FORTUNE}"</body></html> > /home/kdub/docs/signature.html

This script creates the signature I wanted whenever its run, with a different 80 character or shorter fortune attached to the end. I used the classic program “fortune” (included by default on most distributions) to generate the fortune. They’re all pretty creative fortunes, of equal or higher quality than you’d find in a fortune cookie. :P

Next, to make this rotate fortunes, I added this script to crontab…
Run

 crontab -e

next, add

 */5 * * * * /home/kdub/source/scripts/fortune.sh

Note:For both this, and the script, adjust pathnames accordingly to where you want the signature file to live, and where you want the script to live. As you see, I keep my signature file in ~/docs and my script in the directory I keep my scripts.

Finally, navigate to “Account Settings” in Thunderbird’s menus, and add the html file the script generates as your signature. See screenshot for where this is done. (Click to enlarge)

With this, every time you write a new email, you’ll have a new fortune to send, auto-provided for you!

Side note: Be careful if you’ve installed the “offensive fortunes pack”. (Debian package ‘fortunes-off’).

Gnome has a gconf setting you can modify to do this. XFCE4 takes a bit of conf file modification to get this working though.
Open the file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.
Change the line:
$XDG_DESKTOP_DIR=$HOME/Desktop
to
$XDG_DESKTOP_DIR=$HOME
and restart your session.

Your home directory now has all your background icons, instead of whats in ~/Desktop!

The notification, sent to the inboxes of current Pandora users, says that this will only affect 10% of the users. I love the service, and probably fall into that 10% category. I may just have to shell out the cash to keep using it.

Personally, I love Pandora and I was pretty disappointed to find that message from their CEO in my inbox this morning. I cannot blame the site though. They’re doing a great job, and its unfortunate that external business and political pressures have colluded to stifle freedom and creativity that comes from innovation like Pandora has always displayed. Pandora chose to do introduce these necessary fees in a “classy” way, if you will, by my estimate by maintaining their free service for most of their users.

Mark one more in the Big Content’s “Evil Victories” column.

Conversely, how often do you use Escape? I use it all the time. Yet its way the hell up there on the keyboard. You have to remove your fingers from the home row, and go hit the Escape button, and reorient your hand every time you want to hit Escape.

In the name of efficiency (and the little finger on my left hand) I deactivate caps lock all together and force the caps lock key to work as the “Escape” key. Its one keyboard hack I can’t really live without, especially as a vim user. You can make the switch easily on linux. Just run
xmodmap -e 'clear Lock' #ensures you're not stuck in CAPS on mode
xmodmap -e 'keycode 0x42=Escape' #remaps the keyboard

With this hack, your caps lock key will work as an escape key, and your hands just became a little less prone to carpal tunnel syndrome.

What most people don’t know are that there are some pretty humorous RFC’s out there if you look for them. (in contrast to IEEE, who are way  too serious to make jokes) :P.

Here’s my favorite joke RFC’s:

• RFC0968 “Twas the night before start-up”
  A standardized adaptation of the classic poem.
• RFC 1882 “The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas”
  Another Christmas inspired RFC, this one is the classic carol, adapted for engineers.
• RFC3251 “Electricity over IP”
  How you can use the IP protocol to distribute electricity.
• RFC2324 “Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP)”
  Because, who wants to get up to make a pot of coffee?
• RFC2795 “The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)”
  The protocols an infinite amount of monkeys sitting at an infinite amount of typewriters should follow in order to produce the works of Shakespeare.
• RFC748 “Telnet randomly-lose option”
  Telnet’s a bit before my time, but its pretty funny anyways.
• And my all time favorite…
  RFC1149 “A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers”
  The internet, 19th century style. All you need is a piece of paper, and an extinct bird. :D

Its nice to know some engineers have a sense of humor. I’m sure there’s more of these out there, but these are just a few I found from trolling the RFC Index today. Let me know if you find more! :