wp.jochen.hayek.name/blog-en

Author: johayek

  • “accesskeys” with Firefox

    Q: Did you know, how to make use of what gets defined in HTML through the accesskeyattribute of the a tag?
    A: You have to press some Modifier + the defined accesskey.
    All the HTML generated from my DocBook files defines access keys for navigating to the statically previous and next page, the home page, and to climb up the tree.
    For the Firefox on openSUSE Linux the Modifier is Alt+Shift,
    for the Firefox on OS X Snow Leopard the Modifier is simply Ctrl,
    for Google Chrome on OS X Snow Leopard the Modifier is Ctrl+Alt.

  • re-factoring, re-organising, …

    O, I enjoyed re-organising my blogs (adding a few details here and there), modifying my computer home directory tree structure, moving a few files from here to there …

  • emacs, version control, …

    I doubt it, that any other editor resp. IDE software is able to hold a candle to GNU emacs with its plugged in version control access to subversion, RCS, and CVS.
    Once again I can just shout out to the world: I love emacs.
    Where would my productivity be without emacs?
    I almost never need to use my mouse to do anything within emacs.
    (Alright, once in a while I use the emacs GUI menu to remind me of the appropriate shortcut …)
    My hands can keep, where they can achieve the most: on the keyboard.

    Update 2013-01-07:

    This article attracted far too much SPAM, so I had to disable commenting.

  • Hackers’s dictionary aka the Jargon File abandoned by ESR

    Looks like the Jargon File got abandoned by Eric S. Raymond.
    It hasn’t been updated during the last couple of years.
    I offered Eric to invest time and energy,
    but I got no answer back.

    Update 2012-12-25:

    I once owned a printed copy of this book, but it was one of the many victims of various accidents inside my traveling luggage (and also at home) through the years: water, beer, wine, fruits, …

    Pls visit “The Jargon File” resp. “The New Hacker’s Dictionary”:

  • emacs and subversion

    In order to do some subversion work from within emacs,
    find and load psvn.el,
    and then start svn-status on an emacs command line.
    I love it.

  • my own subversion repositories “out there”

    Created my 1st subversion on my web space using the svn+ssh protocol
    along the lines of the PragProg book.
    I used this scheme,
    because I could get started w/o any admin intervention.
    It also behaves fairly safe.

    Alright, something on the background:
    My web space provider gives me UNIX shell access via ssh.

    The svnadmin create ... got executed locally on the machine,
    where the repository lives,
    afterwards I followed chapter 5 accessing a repository, section on svn+ssh,
    you find a free extract of that
    book here.

    Because of the ssh detail
    there is a tiny obstacle to overcome,
    until I will be able to share this repository with co-workers.

    My ISP employs somebody incredibly helpful to me,
    and that guy actually managed to run another svnserver,
    just dedicated to me,
    fully configurable by myself,
    on a fixed port.
    I am overwhelmed.

    Q: What do I pay them for that service?
    A: They regard it as included in my package.

  • just wrote my 1st Rakefile

    It took me a while to finally get going but it was worth while investing the time to dive into it.
    next step is http://buildr.rubyforge.org , and I am really keen on that.
    something capable of replacing Ant and Groovy — amazing!

    Single-quoted strings as “sh” commands get displayed quite nicely, double-quoted strings get displayed on a single line, thus all line breaks are lost. That looks bad.

  • rewrote my CV to use XML-Résumé-Library

  • reading RailsSpace (the book)

    from ch. 1 (introduction):

    Ruby comes out of the Perl tradition,
    and Yukihito “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby,
    calls it “a better Perl than Perl”.
    In our experience, most programmers with exposure to both languages agree.
    We’d add that, for web programming, embedded Ruby (ERb) is a better PHP than PHP.

    Actually although I (Jochen Hayek) was never terribly unsatisfied with PERL
    (although I started a Python/IMAP project during my best PERL times,
    because Python then quite intrigued me,
    just as Ruby intrigues me now),
    I also like Ruby better than PERL.
    But one of PERL’s big advantages is CPAN.
    I hope, Ruby’s repositories can compare to that.
    So far I am not quite convinced of that,
    but I am still quite willing to go for Ruby and Rails now.
    It can’t be such a big mistake.

  • found UNIX utility “multitail”

    It got mentioned in a magazine.
    It’s like “tail” on many files at once,
    but much better.
    We shall see … .
    I will give it a try at work,
    where I often have to view and follow more than a single file at a time,
    when I restart the applications looking for weird behaviour.