cygri’s notes on web data

Danny Ayers reveals the secret: How to find inner peace and feel great. And it’s much simpler than I had thought.

Some more VIM goodies that have accumulated in mv .vimrc over the years:

Switch between :split and :vsplit windows using CTRL+hjkl:

map <c-J> <c-W>j<c-W>_
map <c-K> <c-W>k<c-W>_
map <c-H> <c-W>h<c-W>_
map <c-L> <c-W>l<c-W>_
set wmh=0

Nicer color scheme: brighter comments, more contrast for search highlight. Intended for systems that use the light-on-dark scheme.

hi Comment ctermfg=darkcyan
hi Identifier ctermfg=lightgreen
hi PreProc cterm=underline
hi Search ctermbg=darkblue cterm=underline

Triple <esc> removes the annoying search highlight created by incremental search

:nnoremap <silent> <esc><esc><esc> :noh<cr>

In PHP files, shift-K searches word under cursor in online manual

autocmd FileType php
    \ nmap <s-k> <s-k><cr> |
    \ set keywordprg=php_lookup.sh

(php_lookup.sh is a shell script or batch file on the path that opens a web browser on the function’s manual page, e.g. for Mac OS X: open http://de2.php.net/$1)

In PHP files, ctrl-B checks PHP syntax

autocmd FileType php map <c-B> :w !php -l<cr>

Activate syntax highlighting for .rhtml files (put eruby.vim to ~/.vim/syntax/eruby.vim)

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.rhtml set syn=eruby

See also: VIM: Switching off auto-indentation, VIM: Setting custom tab behaviour for some filetypes, VIM: Quick autocompletion

This little VIM script enables autocompletion with the tab key. All words in the current file will be used as possible completions. No cross-file autocompletion yet. Put this into ~/.vimrc (or _vimrc in your VIM directory if you are on windows); create the file if it doesn’t exist:

" Autocompletion with <tab>
function InsertTabWrapper()
    let col = col('.') - 1
    if !col || getline('.')[col - 1] !~ '\k'
        return "\<tab>"
    else
        return "\<c-p>"
    endif
endfunction
inoremap <tab> <c-r>=InsertTabWrapper()

To change the VIM tab settings for some file types, you can put something like this into ~/.vimrc (or _vimrc in your VIM directory if you are on windows); create the file if it doesn’t exist:

" Default tab behaviour: Use spaces instead of tabs, a tab is 4 spaces
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=4
set tabstop=4

" But tab should be 2 spaces in HTML and Smarty templates
autocmd FileType html
  \ setlocal shiftwidth=2 |
  \ setlocal tabstop=2
autocmd FileType smarty
  \ setlocal shiftwidth=2 |
  \ setlocal tabstop=2

The first block sets the default behaviour. The second block overrides the settings for the html and smarty file types.

How to switch off all kinds of auto-indentation in VIM. Put this into ~/.vimrc (or _vimrc in your VIM directory if you are on windows); create the file if it doesn’t exist:

" Switch off all auto-indenting
set nocindent
set nosmartindent
set noautoindent
set indentexpr=
filetype indent off
filetype plugin indent off

The first line is a comment; the rest switches off all the different parts of the auto-indentation system.

An insightful Paul Graham quote (from this essay):

Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.

This is a sufficient explanation for the success of open source, in my book: The market forces in an open source ecosystem are much stronger.

(Writing this, I notice that the words “market” and “ecosystem” basically mean the same thing.)

Is this cool or what?

    xml.rss("version" => "2.0") do
      xml.channel do
        xml.title(@feed_title)
        xml.link(@url)
        xml.description "Basecamp: Recent items"
        xml.language "en-us"
        xml.ttl "40"

        for item in @recent_items
          xml.item do
            xml.title(item_title(item))
            xml.description(item_description(item))
            xml.pubDate(item_pubDate(item))
            xml.guid(@recent_items.url(item))
            xml.link(@recent_items.url(item))
          end
        end
      end
    end

This is from the ActionPack documentation, a part of Ruby on Rails. I don’t fully understand the example (Where are the item_foo methods defined?), but this looks like a damn slick way to generate XML.

I’m very impressed by Ruby. The language’s syntax is very flexible and makes it easy to create “little languages” tailored for certain jobs, like XML generation and build files and object-relational mapping.

The obvious question: How can this be used to manipulate RDF?