Weekly Vim Focus

I’m a long time user of vim, but sometimes I feel I have retained some bad habits from when I first started using it, or that I am stagnating in my skills. Sure, I learn a new trick every now and then, but most of them I tend to forget again. So I am going to pick a few commands, and make an effort to stick to them consciously for a week. Hopefully. they will make it into my permanent repertoire that way. Depending on how well this goes, I might make a series out of it.

Here’s what I am going for this week:

• use c for change instead of deleting and then going to insert mode
• use ctrl-O to jump to the previous location (I just found out this also works across buffers)
• use ctrl-R to paste registers in insert mode
• use hjkl instead of arrow keys for navigation. (this is a big one, tried it before, and failed. But it makes a lot of sense to keep the fingers on home row as much as possible. Might go as far as remapping the arrow keys to force myself to do this.)

Seems like a short enough list to be tractable. More to come next week if I find this approach to be helpful.

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Python für Wissenschaftler

Ich habe einen kurzen Werbevortrag für Python am Institut gehalten, an dem ich arbeite. Falls es jemanden interessiert, hier die PDF: mccolgan_python_2011

Dancing

OFFF Barcelona 2011 Main Titles

Opening titles for this years OFFF film festival in Barcelona, by Mischa Rozema and Si Scott. Beautiful, nightmarish, inspiring, dark.

(via nerdcore)

Figure – The Monsters Revenge

I have been liking all of Figures releases so far, and this latest one is no exception. The baselines are absolutely exaggerated and somehow that goes well with the ridiculous soundbites from old horror flicks.

Justice – Civilization

Here’s hoping they release a new album in the near future.

And as a bonus, the commercial using the same tune, directed by Romain Gavras, who also directed the Stress video:

Duck Sauce

I know this is about 1000 internet years old, but it’s just too good not to be posted here.

Aachen at night

Paris

Is Google deliberately screwing up social?

This argument may seem excessively contrived, but thinking about why Google doesn’t seem to be able to get social right, this thought came across my mind:

If we think of the 3 major players seemingly competing for dominance of the future of computing as Apple, Google and Facebook, they are in a Mexican standoff, where each player is pitted against 2 opponents. How Facebook and Apple are competing is not entirely clear to me, but let’s assume for the sake of the argument they are.

This kind of situation is known as a Truel(tri+duel, smart, huh?) in game theory, and in a highly idealized version, an interesting strategy is optimal. Quoting Wikipedia:

If a single bullet is used, the probabilities of hitting the target are equal and deliberate missing is allowed, the best strategy for the first shooter is to deliberately miss. Since he is now disarmed, the next shooter will have no reason to shoot the first one and so will shoot at the third shooter. While the second shooter might miss deliberately, there would then be the risk that the third one would shoot him. If the first shooter does not deliberately miss, he will presumably be shot by whichever shooter remained.

So for this argument, one might think Google is deliberately screwing up social, which is traditionally Facebook’s turf, thus enticing Facebook to compete with Apple, since Google is apparently not such a big threat.

As I mentioned earlier, this is highly constructed(it ignores Microsoft, for example) and probably far from reality, but I thought it was an entertaining idea, and perhaps contains a grain of truth.