Sep 02
2011

I was looking at some numbers on a web page. A wide variety of fairly large numbers. The web page didn’t provide any kind of average for the numbers, and I was curious. Curious, of course, meant writing a script to solve the problem. Yes, I could have copied the numbers out, punched them into a calculator one by one, or opened up Numbers and pasted them into cells… bah…

Apr 24
2011

I was playing with the new TextMate Markdown bundle for MultiMarkdown 3 when I remembered an old nit I had with the list commands: no single-keystroke way to move list items up and down. Unless I’m completely forgetting about a shortcut, moving list items around involves selecting the entire line and using Control-Command-Up/Down to move it. Obviously, not a big deal, but 5 minutes…

Apr 03
2011

I was tooling around the Vim website looking at blogging plugins this morning. I noticed that one of them, Vimpress, had linked to an old project of mine that allowed you to work with Ultimate Tag Warrior tags through XML-RPC. Since the inclusion of tagging support in WordPress, Ultimate Tag Warrior has been defunct, and so have the UTW-RPC plugin and associated AutoTag TextMate bundle.

Mar 18
2011

I use TextMate for editing most of my Markdown. I could name a dozen reasons why this is the case, but let’s leave it at auto-pairing, wrapping and the Blogsmith Bundle features. Anyhow, I got a bug yesterday to make TextMate work in “concentration” mode (ala WriteRoom). Not because I think that will improve my writing habits, I just wanted to see if it was possible. A few…

Feb 20
2011

I’ve been flirting with a plain-text to-do system again. The biggest problem for me is that a plain text system opens up so many possibilities for fiddling and scripting. I always end up fiddling more than working when I try it. I don’t see any reason this time would be different, but it’s Sunday and I have some extra time on my hands after being snowed in today. So I’m fiddling.

Dec 11
2010

I’d just like to put it out there, as someone will eventually: Notational Velocity ALT (henceforth referred to as nvALT) is turning into something antithetical to the original premise of Notational Velocity. I understand that, and I accept it.

Notational Velocity is an amazing note-taking tool, elegant in its simplicity and without much need for expansion. I love it. nvALT is…

Oct 31
2010

I just discovered Sparkup (via NetTuts+). It adds the one thing I find lacking in Zen Coding: the ability to traverse backward in a shortcut (among several other improvements).

Background: Zen Coding is a Python script that can run in various extensible editors, my favorite being TextMate. It turns strings like div#branding>h1#header+ul#nav>li*5>a into a fully marked up HTML…