" Ali Rizvi's Vim Settings

set number
set shiftwidth=4

set incsearch
set hlsearch
set textwidth=80

" from lindes:
syntax on
hi Comment term=bold ctermfg=Cyan guifg=Cyan
set autoindent

" from benji fisher to turn on the matchit plugin automatically and more
filetype plugin on

" explicity map file extension .t to perl syntax instead of tads
" which is autodetected by filetype plugin on
" This line should always be after filetype plugin
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.t set syntax=perl

" to show real tabs and spaces in file
set list
set listchars=tab:>-,trail:^,eol:$
"set listchars=tab:>-,trail:-

"to add spaces instead of tabs
set expandtab

" evil, bad! -- hard tabs should be 8 chars... --lindes
" set tabstop=4
" _but_ we can use this:
set smarttab

"use arrow keys to move to previous and next buffers
nnoremap  :bn
nnoremap  :bp

"make the background light
set background=light

"show matching parens
set showmatch

"show row and column number
set ruler

" allow backspacing over everything in insert mode
set backspace=indent,eol,start

filetype plugin indent on

"set shiftwidth to 2 for ruby only
autocmd FileType ruby setlocal  sw=2

"shortcuts inspired by http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/11/17/vim-follow-up
let mapleader = " "
map n :execute 'NERDTreeToggle ' . getcwd()

let g:fuzzy_ignore = "*.log"
let g:fuzzy_matching_limit = 70
map ft :FuzzyFinderTextMate
map fb :FuzzyFinderBuffer
map ff :FuzzyFinderFile =fnamemodify('**/x', ':p')
map fm :FuzzyFinderMruFile

command Ped :exec '!p4 edit %'
command Pad :exec '!p4 add %'

set backupdir=~/.vim-tmp
set directory=~/.vim-tmp

#
# Example of a user's .screenrc file
#

# This is how one can set a reattach password:
# password ODSJQf.4IJN7E    # "1234"

# no annoying audible bell, please
vbell on

# detach on hangup
autodetach on

# don't display the copyright page
startup_message off

# emulate .logout message
pow_detach_msg "Screen session of \$LOGNAME \$:cr:\$:nl:ended."

# advertise hardstatus support to $TERMCAP
# termcapinfo  * '' 'hs:ts=\E_:fs=\E\\:ds=\E_\E\\'

# make the shell in every window a login shell
#shell -$SHELL

# autoaka testing
# shellaka '> |tcsh'
# shellaka '$ |sh'

# set every new windows hardstatus line to somenthing descriptive
# defhstatus "screen: ^En (^Et)"

defscrollback 10000

# don't kill window after the process died
# zombie "^["
################
#
# xterm tweaks
#

#xterm understands both im/ic and doesn't have a status line.
#Note: Do not specify im and ic in the real termcap/info file as
#some programs (e.g. vi) will not work anymore.
termcap  xterm hs@:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:im=\E[4h:ei=\E[4l
terminfo xterm hs@:cs=\E[%i%p1%d;%p2%dr:im=\E[4h:ei=\E[4l

#80/132 column switching must be enabled for ^AW to work
#change init sequence to not switch width
termcapinfo  xterm Z0=\E[?3h:Z1=\E[?3l:is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;4;6l

# Make the output buffer large for (fast) xterms.
termcapinfo xterm* OL=10000

# tell screen that xterm can switch to dark background and has function
# keys.
termcapinfo xterm 'VR=\E[?5h:VN=\E[?5l'
termcapinfo xterm 'k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~'
termcapinfo xterm 'kh=\E[1~:kI=\E[2~:kD=\E[3~:kH=\E[4~:kP=\E[H:kN=\E[6~'

# special xterm hardstatus: use the window title.
termcapinfo xterm 'hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=07:ds=\E]2;screen07'

#terminfo xterm 'vb=\E[?5h$\E[?5l'
termcapinfo xterm 'vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[34h\E[?25h:vs=\E[34l'

# emulate part of the 'K' charset
termcapinfo   xterm 'XC=K%,%\E(B,[\304,\\\\\326,]\334,{\344,|\366,}\374,~\337'
# xterm-52 tweaks:
# - uses background color for delete operations
termcapinfo xterm be

################
#
# wyse terminals
#

#wyse-75-42 must have flow control (xo = "terminal uses xon/xoff")
#essential to have it here, as this is a slow terminal.
termcapinfo wy75-42 xo:hs@

# New termcap sequences for cursor application mode.
termcapinfo wy* CS=\E[?1h:CE=\E[?1l:vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[?25h:VR=\E[?5h:VN=\E[?5l:cb=\E[1K:CD=\E[1J

################
#
# other terminals
#

#make hp700 termcap/info better
termcapinfo  hp700 'Z0=\E[?3h:Z1=\E[?3l:hs:ts=\E[62"p\E[0$~\E[2$~\E[1$}:fs=\E[0}\E[61"p:ds=\E[62"p\E[1$~\E[61"p:ic@'

# Extend the vt100 desciption by some sequences.
termcap  vt100* ms:AL=\E[%dL:DL=\E[%dM:UP=\E[%dA:DO=\E[%dB:LE=\E[%dD:RI=\E[%dC
terminfo vt100* ms:AL=\E[%p1%dL:DL=\E[%p1%dM:UP=\E[%p1%dA:DO=\E[%p1%dB:LE=\E[%p1%dD:RI=\E[%p1%dC

################
#
# keybindings
#

#remove some stupid / dangerous key bindings
bind k
bind ^k
bind .
bind ^\
bind \\
bind ^h
bind h
#make them better
bind 'K' kill
bind 'I' login on
bind 'O' login off
bind '}' history

# Yet another hack:
# Prepend/append register [/] to the paste if ^a^] is pressed.
# This lets me have autoindent mode in vi.
register [ "33:se noai15a"
register ] "33:se ai15a"
bind ^] paste [.]

################
#
# default windows
#

# screen -t local 0
# screen -t mail 1 elm
# screen -t 40 2 rlogin faui40
# caption always "%3n %t%? @%u%?%? [%h]%?"
# hardstatus alwaysignore
# hardstatus alwayslastline "%w"

# bind = resize =
# bind + resize +1
# bind - resize -1
# bind _ resize max
#
# attrcolor u "-u b"
# attrcolor b "R"

# fix delayed vi/vim startup in screen
altscreen on

# something that would reload the .screenrc file on reattach
bind R source $HOME/.screenrc

# http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-gnu_screen/index.html
hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "

Learned this interesting tidbit on Seattle.rb mailing list that appending a string with << is 10 times more efficient than +=. This would matter if you are doing a lot of string concatenation.

From: Joe Van Dyk
Date: Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 10:20 AM
Subject: Re: [Ruby] += vs <<
To: Seattle Ruby Brigade!

$ cat t.rb
require 'benchmark'

long_string = 's' * 100000000
another_long_string = 'y ' * 1000

Benchmark.bm do |b|
b.report("<<") { long_string << another_long_string }
b.report("+=") { long_string += another_long_string }
end

$ ruby t.rb
user system total real
<< 0.000000 0.020000 0.020000 ( 0.022544)
+= 0.110000 0.130000 0.240000 ( 0.250046)

Update: Later in this thread mentioned a comprehensive blog entry about this topic : The Fastest Way to Concatenate Strings and Arrays in Ruby

I encountered a case where we needed to skip a filter as it was causing infinite redirection in a subclass. I found my answer in: Rails Filters Documentation

Filter chain skipping

Declaring a filter on a base class conveniently applies to its subclasses, but sometimes a subclass should skip some of its superclass’ filters:

  class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    before_filter :authenticate
    around_filter :catch_exceptions
  end

  class WeblogController < ApplicationController
    # Will run the :authenticate and :catch_exceptions filters.
  end

  class SignupController < ApplicationController
    # Skip :authenticate, run :catch_exceptions.
    skip_before_filter :authenticate
  end

  class ProjectsController < ApplicationController
    # Skip :catch_exceptions, run :authenticate.
    skip_filter :catch_exceptions
  end

  class ClientsController  :index
  end

This might be old news for some but today I discovered firefox like tabs (not to be confused with tab character for indenting) in vim (not gvim).

To open a file in a new tab while inside vim simply do:

:tabe filename

To open all files in a directory in vim tabs from command line do:

vim -p dir_name/*

To move around in tabs in command mode you do:

gt

It is hard to google for them as it is easy to confuse them with tab character. Here is the online doc page for them:
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tabpage.html

The current tab was setup to be not underlined vs other tabs were underline I discovered the way to show current tab in reverse:

:highlight TabLineSel cterm=reverse

Of course the options are endless and when I shared this discovery with Arnab he told me there is an entire chapter about this in the swroopch’s Vim book actually it one section in his Book.

Thank you Daniel Wong for introducing me to vim tabs. It was instant pay off on encouraging Daniel to use either use a real programmers’ editor like Vim or Emacs instead of gedit and teaching him the basic Vim (once he choose my choice of text editor on his own, I did not pressure him, honest).

One of the reasons I like posterous (other than its awesome multimedia media support) is that when I create post their I can set it up to tweet to my twitter account about my latest post.

WordPress.com is still my first love when it comes to blogging so I thought there has to be a way to tweet about my new post and I finally found it after a lot of googling. So it is a bit obscure.

* Login to wordpress.com
* Go to your blog’s dashboard by clicking “My Dashboard”
* Click on “My Blogs” under Dashboard
* In front of the blog name you want this for (in case you have multiple blogs like me) look for the “publicize” column and check Twitter. WordPress uses oAuth to authorize (did not ask me my twitter login)
* Post new blog entries on WordPress.

Cheers!

PS: Did not find this (http://en.support.wordpress.com/publicize/) when googling but when I searched for wordpress.com publicize.

I have been spoiled by simple way for getting a explain plan from MySQL and web tools for oracle.

Today somebody asked me how to get an explain plan from oracle command line sqlplus and I discovered it is a little painful. Here is what I found out:

explain plan for select * from shiny_complex_table;

select
  substr (lpad(' ', level-1) || operation || ' (' || options || ')',1,30 ) "Operation",
  object_name                                                              "Object"
from
  plan_table
start with id = 0
connect by prior id=parent_id;

Reference: http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/explainplan.html

Two new apps I always wanted was the dropbox app and wordpress app, today is my lucky day I got them both.

This morning I was in a mode to do a regex kata and thought it would be interesting to see if I can substitute CamelCase (I call it JavaCase for fun) to underscore_separated_words (I did a search and could not find a good word for this so) I will call it ruby_case.

Here is how I started (note in my setting of vim you have to escape parens \):

:%s/\([a-z]\)\([A-Z]\)/\1_\2/gc

The above matches lowercase letter followed by uppercase letter and captures them then replaces them with underscore between them.

:%s/\(\l\)\(\u\)/\1_\2/gc

I found that Vim has metacharacters for upper (\u) and lowercase (\l). So above become cleaner version of the previous, call it refactoring. (JavaCase => Java_Case)

:%s/\(\l\)\(\u\)/\1_\L\2/gc

I found how to change an uppercase capture to lowercase. But this was leaving first character of the word still uppercase (JavaCase => Java_case)

:%s/\(\<\u\).*\(\l\)\(\u\)/\L\1\2_\L\3/gc

In this attempt to capture the first letter and lower case it I lost the letters in between. (JavaCase => ja_case)

:%s/\(\<\u.*\)\(\l\)\(\u\)/\L\1\2_\L\3/gc

Finally, I got what I wanted. (JavaCase => java_case) Hurray!

But I notice the match is greedy, so if there are multiple CamelCase on the same line this would fail.

For now I will leave this as an exercise for the reader as I am out of time for now, when I have a solution I will add it here.

This was a fun little exercise and I enjoyed it very much. Now I can find and solve a problem like this every morning it will jump start the day.

Reference: Vim Regular Expression 101 (http://www.geocities.com/volontir/)

Cheers!

The frisson never died. The excitement kept me turning one page after another. Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and learning : Refactor Your Wetware is life changing and I highly recommend it to all Software Developers new and old.

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (PTL) is full of ideas and insights. It is based on a lot of research and background reading. It would save you a lot of trouble of going through a lot of books and research to learn the same material which might not be written this well. I had already read some of the books mentioned in the book, some were on my candidate list and some I added to my candidate list based on citations from this book but this is a concise collection of all these tips and tricks you learn from all these books (some of them I will never read as they are research on neuroscience and nursing professionals).

What does Pragmatic Programmer and Pragmatic Thinking and Learning have in common besides practical advice, tons of insight and being my all time favorite books? Andy Hunt. Andy is awesome. Not only he writes well he is a very articulate speaker. In fact the way I got introduced to this book while it was being written was a talk he gave at my company. This book is so much more than that talk I loved.

I will write more about the practical tips as I act on them in the future in this blog or on my twitter but for now I just wanted to give a shout out for this fantastic book.

If you want to buy it from my favorite book seller online here is the link.