Archive for January, 2009

AT&T 3G is faster than my home broadband.

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Currently I live right on the edge of 3G coverage, I was surprised to see that I even was able to get 3G c

overage considering I live in the middle of nowhere. I’m about 20 min from Columbus OH.

My broadband connection is wireless and it caps me at 185 kilobytes per second.

The app I used for the test was Speedtest[itunes].

Speedtest Results.

Posted in Iphone | 1 Comment »

Ignoring directories with Git.

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Ignoring directories in git was a concept hard for me to grasp. The gitignore help file didn’t help me all that much.

If the pattern ends with a slash, it is removed for the purpose of the following description, but it would only find a match with a directory. In other words, foo/ will match a directory foo and paths underneath it, but will not match a regular file or a symbolic link foo (this is consistent with the way how pathspec works in general in git).

This never worked for me. The only way I could get it to work was to use something like “directory/*” in my .gitignore file. I could also just use “directory”, but that would match any file and directory with that name. It would also look for other matches further down the tree recursively.

So in summary to hide the build directory use:

build/*

Posted in Git | No Comments »

Amazon MP3 Usability review.

Monday, January 26th, 2009

Since it’s launch in late 2007, I’ve been buying all of my MP3’s from Amazon. It was a pretty easy decision for me to make, no DRM, acutal MP3s, a higher bitrate (256), and it’s cross platform. But there is still room for improvement.

(more…)

Posted in Usability | No Comments »

Configuring vim for syntax highlighting over ssh.

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

I’ve recently switched from textmate to MacVim and so far I’m loving it. It’s great since you can use vim on any platform and that allows me to use vim on my production server over ssh to editing config files and even fixing some minor bugs for some websites. 

So wouldn’t it be great if I could use vims syntax highlighting? Here are the steps I used.

  • Make sure that your current terminal is capable of displaying 256 colors. Since I use a Mac I had to make the switch from terminal.app to Iterm. In Iterm’s profiles I changed the terminal type to “xterm-256color”. Then I ran a color test that verified that I was using 256 color mode.
  • On my machine I also had to set my TERM variable to “xterm-256color”.
    • export TERM=xterm256color
  • Then you just need to find a nice color scheme that only uses a 256 color palette. I choose summerfruit.
  • And finally you have to turn on syntax highlighting in vim with (if it’s not already on):
    • :syntax on

Screenshot of my vim configuration 

Posted in Vim | No Comments »