My Vim customization

In my previous post, I mentioned how I migrated back to Vim for my development environment. Vim is fantastic but the default settings may not suit your needs. Given that Vim does not provide a GUI based configuration mechanism, getting it to fit your needs will take a bit of tweaking .VIM files and scavenging Google for tips. This was part of the reason why I stuck to Eclipse for so long.

Anyway, I have finally customized Vim enough to use it full time. Below is a list of my customizations; perhaps it will be of use to you.

Filed under: Tips

TortoiseSVN directory diff

Recently, I tossed out Eclipse for a simpler Vim + TortoiseSVN development environment. I’ve used Eclipse for several years and love the integration. However, the 30 second startup time has always discouraged me from starting it up too often. Not to mention the 100+ MB installation size, excessive memory usage and tedious setup and update process. Eclipse rocks and I miss the environment every day, but I need something faster and more nimble that can adapt to my 10 minute coding sessions.

Filed under: Tips

Turning to Akismet

We live in a world of wasted effort. I get my daily dose of email spam despite some pretty decent filtering. And ever since I started this blog a few months back, I gotten to experience the joys of comment spam first hand.

Filed under: Tips

Automating the Encoder

I recently shared my solution for encoding home videos I record using a DVD camcorder. While the solution helped me understand the encoding process, it was not exactly user friendly in terms of the number of steps involved. Being the automation freak that I am, I have written a Python script that takes care of the entire process in a single step.

Filed under: Tips

Unreasonable Firefox memory usage

I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 recently and was impressed like most other folks. Things were fine until I started noticing excessive hard disk activity as well as sluggish performance and intermittant hangs.

Filed under: Tips

Session cookies rejected by Internet Explorer

Recently, I ran into a problem with an image gallery web application I am writing in PHP. Throughout development, which was done on my Windows laptop using XAMPP, everything worked perfectly fine, both on Firefox as well as Internet Explorer.

As soon as I deployed my application on my Linux server, IE suddenly stopped accepting my session cookies. The weird thing was that Firefox continued to work perfectly fine.

Filed under: Tips

Decoding the Encoder

So I bought a new DVD camcorder from Costco a few days back. I’m new to the camcorder world. I never really had a need to record anything. A digital camera was good enough for all those vacations and someone else always had a camcorder for those family occasions. However, things are going to change. My wife and I are expecting and due in a couple months. Many deem a camcorder an essential gadget in the baby toolbox and I totally agree with that philosophy.

Recently, we had a small family function so it was the perfect opportunity to buy a camcorder and test it out. The intention is that by the time the kid comes, I’ll be all prepared.

Filed under: Tips