So we arrived at the hostel, a very nice place too. I’d recommend it if I could be bothered to find out what it is. I’ll try and remember to insert a reference here:
Reference
So yeah nice place. Vancouver is not very exciting so far but as was pointed out to me: the area around the airport is never going to be very nice.
The public transport on the other hand seems excellent so far.
So we’re at the airport. Mostly uneventful journey so far, luckily. Airports terrify me; flying doesn’t scare me at all, but the chance of being rejected for something as simple as forgetting your passport is so unnerving.
I’ve been up since 6am this morning, which is pretty tough. I’ve managed to get some free wifi at the airport, ironically from BT Openzone which have announced that they’re closing to O2 customers.
Tomorrow I fly to Victoria, Canada to attend the International Astronomical Union Symposium 299, entitled Exploring the formation and evolution of planetary systems. I’m presenting a poster, which I may put in the space below for all to see, but to cut a long story short: it’s blue.
I get to enjoy a 9.5 hour flight across the Atlantic, mostly by myself and hopefully I’ll be blogging about it whilst I’m there, though I may have to go to talks and get quite drunk with my peers.
In vim a useful command is the :Explore, which opens the netrw browser at the location of the current file. This is especially handy for editing files over ssh, but is handy for those who don’t like the file tree type plugins.
The command can be shortened to :E which is fantastic, quickly browse the file system inside vim.
I was sceptical when I first stepped into the land of Lordran and perished at the hands of yet another undead nightmare hunting me, for I assume I’d angered it in some way. I do not know what I did to annoy this poor hollowed creature but it wanted my blood so I unburdened it of the strange life force causing it to attack me so. I had already died to it many times but this time I managed to vanquish the foe and move on…
…to the next foe and subsequently die at its cold hands. This pattern repeated itself for quite a while until finally I managed to defeat the Asylum Demon and escape that wretched place.
Often when developing complex client side apps, a simple python -m SimpleHTTPServer can host the html. For a node backend though, a second server has to be run to host the REST api, which must be on a different domain. For example the python server is on port 8000, whereas the REST server is run on port 3000.
Fluid is a Mac OSX app which can convert a single website into an application, with its own icon and place in the dock and task switcher. It is a great way to get the desktop like application feel for a web app.
This works particularly well for single-page apps like gmail, or Trello. The app can be set to not close the window on close, just hide which leaves gmail running in the background, and lets trello remember the last board you were looking at.
So I was coding the other day and had some strange behaviour from one of my Python scripts. I was running two boolean checks which update a variable. Both should be |= types, but it turns out a ! character looks incredibly similar (to my tired eyes at least) to the | character which of course is a completely different boolean operator.
Before 
After !
I have been trying to install nginx v1.3.x on my Macbook Pro for a while now to test the native websockets support but I could not find a way to install version 1.3.
I love my Macbook Pro, for development and general computing use. Before I purchased it I was a die hard linux user (apart from gaming which is still dominated by windows unfortunately.) My work involves linux1 and I am a committed vim user.
My work colleagues tend to laugh when I say that I want to use my mouse as little as possible, and that I am quite experienced in command line use. It pains me every time I see my office mates reach over to the mouse to click the save button.
This workflow does not translate too well to the Mac; as far as I understand it Apple2 were one of the first companies to introduce guis for their operating systems.