Tsosie Industries new Blog

This blogged has moved on. You can now find it at http://www.tsosieindustries.com

Vi Level 3 Reached

Level 1 is the start, where you begin making small changes in vi because the sys admin forgot to install nano.

Level 2 was being forsaken by textmate and forced to use windows as a dev environment. Being trapped into any environment because of a tool was not good times. I tried many IDE’s but I preferred the quick simplicity of textmate. I also had a coworker who was big on the Vi. I started with just basic functions like syntax highlighting. Little did I know what would come.

Level 3 is comfort with VI and missing it when not available. Vi works on everything? How could it not be available you may ask? This is the distinction between IDE’s and Vi in my opinion. Vi is not an IDE. No one wants FireFox to act like Visual Studio. But thanks to the good people who created http://vimperator.org/vimperator there is a way to have command line functionality in firefox and vi flavor.

Mouse and Keyboard is leet for FPS, but most functions don’t need analog input and so you waste one hand using the mouse. Apply both hands to browsing and such and you have a very neutral resting position and skip the repeated movements from keyboard to mouse.
Include command line like syntax for debugging which I hope to investigate soon, I have a fun time ahead indeed. Can’t wait for what I find in level 4.

Solving E474: Invalid argument: silent w! ++enc=

I found an issue that many have not been able to resolve from my googles so I thought I’d share my solution.

To fix, I found a new version of VimBall.tar.gz (think it was V28). I then extracted it to the vim main directory rather than my personal plugin directory. This seemed to fix it and all was well.

Leveled Up On VI

I think I’m finally coming over the hill of learning VI. A key collection of plugins I found via http://spf13.com/post/the-15-best-vim-plugins

I used most but the SQL plugin. One lacking from the list is the command-t plugin. It requires you to install ruby and its dev headers, but in return you get a file finder almost better than TextMates. Folding I must learn and windows, but my coding speed with VI nav short cuts and block editting have been tremendous. Taking 3 lines and moving them down while indenting them without moving from the home row keys is pretty cool. I also think Its more comfortable since I was getting some RSD from moving to the mouse but without that motion, my hands feel much better.

I highly advise learning vi, even a little at a time. I thought I couldn’t live without TextMate. But now I know I can have the same level of editting (minus cool plugins) on any nix box by default. Much cooler than being stuck on an IDE Island.

Learning VI

I recently took a new position and unfortunately was unable to obtain (for now) a OSX based workstation. Moving to windows from OSX is a night and day transition. But it also taught me new survival skills. I learned that I was dependent on the environment I was in and had been creating test environments to suit my dev station. No more, I thought, it was time to find some thing new.  I tried Visual Studio with a wealth of Plug-Ins, Eclipse, and VI. What I started learning is that when you have more than a few servers, text editing in any Nix environment efficiently becomes awesome. I had learned Vi enough to get by in the past, but once it was embraced, the world changed. When I thought back to why I liked it, I thought back to my Mechwarrior 2 days. Nearly every key binding was on the main keyboard. A mouse may have given you a tad bit better aim, but you’d loose the ability to vent heat, jumpjet, torso turn, shutdown and countless other Mech’ly functions. When split seconds count, moving to the mouse isn’t an option if you can get by with the keyboard. Same so with VI. That said, project management is something I need to solve. There is a Viemu program for VS that lets you use VI functions in VS. But I think Ill try to tweak Vim to get those features. Far leeter.

New Winamp G15 Plugin

The former plugin I used for Winamp ceased working, along with my CPU Utilization plugins. Not sure why, although I did a complete reinstall of my video card so perhaps that plugin was part of Nvidia’s monitor package. In any event, a far superior plugin was found.

Reprinted here for posterity, (source down below)

The best plugin I’ve found for playing music via Winamp is a plugin called “Ray’s Plugin”. Here is a video of it working on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCHAj1vPiCk

The plugin can be downloaded from: http://www.g15-applets.de/download.php?id=88

You need to extract the .dll file to (deafualt installation location) C:/ProgramFiles/Winamp/Plugins

That’s it…now you will see it running.

The Instructions (once downloaded) are as follows:

1) Put gen_15_ray.dll in your winamp plugins folder.
2) Have fun

Softkey 1 (default)
Winamp spectrum
Winamp title
Winamp song length
Winamp Song duration
Winamp song position (progressbar)
Softkey 2 (playlist)
Use volume wheel to scroll through playlist.
press play key to play song.
Softkey 3 (Volume Control)
Hit softkey multiple times to get different mixers.
Use volume wheel to set volume.
Returns to Winamp screen after 2 seconds of inactiviy
Softkey 4 (configuration)
Use scrollwheel to scroll through options
Use Playkey to toggle the selected option.

Also, now you would of noticed only your M buttons are flashing, easily fixed by pressing the 4th lcd button (farest right) you will see the settings menu apear, heres a tricky part, hold down both left and right CTRL and use the volume dial to scroll through the options, while you have both CTRL held down 2 new option will apear at the bottom of the list, the one you want to turn on (by pressing the play/puase button) is “Backlight VU Led”

once that is done you shoudl be right, all you have to do now is fine tune it to your tastes

Also, to get the Logitech G15 multimedia buttons working properly (i.e. the buttons under the LCD display) make sure you remember to do the following in Winamp or they won’t work:

(1) Launch Winamp
(2) Select Options->Preferences…
(3) Select Global Hotkeys and place a check in the box labeled Enabled
(4) Click the Close button

Source: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=243255

The Test Environment

Servicing small businesses at my last two work places, I have had the opportunity to come in where the process of creating a test environment was not yet documented. This has given me the skills to become an expert environment reverse engineer.

Starting a large project, I believe one should always construct their test environments in conjunction with the production. This means laying down a foundation of subversion, virtualbox and main server. Hopefully, the virtualbox and main server will be the same relative OS. More importantly, both constructions should be documented into another important piece, the wiki. For one developer, you may replace this with a bunch of text documents, but a wiki will likely become easier at some point.

Once you begin to on-board help, you will cherish the ease of giving the test environment out as if it were part of the hiring packet.

Or else you can just hire me later and I can reverse engineer and do all of the above. 🙂

Creating Business Cards with Avery 8859 Stock

A few pointers on this. Review wise, the stock is of nice quality and I am very happy with it. I actually like it better than the professionally done ones I had in a previous life. Gloss makes the colors stand out.

However, the word template was rated 2 stars on http://www.avery.com/templates/ There was no way to access the comments on the site, so I was curious why it was 2 stars.

The reason is that, on my HP printer at least, the Margin is off and should be .2″ to the left. Makes that change, and the prints are beautiful. The crisp cut perforation has a more textured feel than die cut, but I doubt few would be able to tell that you had printed your cards at home. If they care that much about what the card was printed on; its time to redesign your card’s content 🙂

–Pro Tips

I used the GIMP for my images. I did a 300 DPI 3.5″X2″ on 300 DPI. The word template resized it oddly. Make sure to resize the image after the copy-paste to proper dimensions, and do a center align. Copy that image, and all the rest will be correct.

I still recommend test prints as your mileage may vary.

Creating a Business Card

Humanity in general prefers reality. One files for a LLC, you are in the law an entity, but nothing really changes. You are just making the motions the state requires. One puts up a website, but there are websites devoted to Pikachu.

Things change a bit when one creates a logo. I had light experience in The Gimp, in no small part having had the privilege of teaching various computer skills to middle school students of Foothills Academy. Over these past few weeks, I’ve logged a lot of time there. If you are creating something that represents you and your company by yourself, you want perfection.

Although I lack innate skill in art (I got a D in art once), I have technique (I sold a painting I created through grid recreation in an art show). I combined this with my strengths. I take photos; lots. I also search the interwebz; lots. Since I knew I could create art by subtle recreation and could work a computer program I combined them to create my most latest logo.

Since this was to be a mark of advertisement, I also went to bars and asked everyone I could on opinions. Side objective, if I am to lead a company, I must become more social as well.

Over those iterations I took opinions tried them, made countless poor designs. Finally, I made a design that evoked two people to argue about certain aspects of it. That is when I knew I succeeded. A logo should evoke emotion and opinion, otherwise, its boring and unworthy of commentary. Finally art had been created.

Now that a solid logo had been produced, it was finally time to make it physical. 6 Hours later, pristine business cards bearing my mark and purpose were created.

To Robin, Richard, Dallas, Ashley, Jeff, Tony, Don, Clea and random Rosati’s Waitress, I thank you for your various levels of involvement in helping me create and make manifest my company logo. Instead of being fully digital or legal, there is now finally a physical presence.

Tsosie Industries is now fully formed. Time to get to actual work 🙂

Trillian Via G15

Download the plugin at http://www.mkleinhans.de/projects/trilliang15

The site may be in German, but the documentation is in English. Effectively, just unzip the DLL into the trillian install directories’ plugin directory. As soon as you reopen Trillian, open preferences and go to plugins, and place a check mark next to the G15 plugin name. You may configure from here as well. In either event you should have it working after another restart. Just click your app selector and you should find G15 Trillian. Fairly simple install.

I loves it 😀