A monochrome still of a seagull catching food in mid flight.

A monochrome still of a log on the beach with a shallow depth of field.

A monochrome still of a seagull landing in between other seagulls.

A monochrome still of my beautiful wife, the two most important things in my life. She’s holding a Red Bull also you see…

A monochrome still of a seagull floating in the wind close to the ground.

A monochrome still of a sign warning of rock falls with waves breaking around it.

A monochrome still of the moment a wave breaks on the rocks, captured in Browns Bay, Auckland.

The latest in the Finda Epic Release night video series. Time lapse for the win!

Link

A black and white still close up of a water feature in Hamilton, Waikato.

Right, since you’ve obviously read my previous post on being awesome with gVim, taken it all to heart and have installed gVim you’re now chomping at the bit to be even more awesome (unless you’re Scott, who clearly already possesses all the awesome a single human body can hold as far as Vim goes…). Being able to fling code around in Vim does make you awesome, I agree, but to round of the whole Vim experience there is something lacking.

Even with the menu bar, opening and creating files, creating directories, renaming files, these things are still a drag, especially on Windows with mixed case and spaces in directory names. Is this the best we can do? Typing file names with auto-complete?

Nay! There is more to life than the TAB key! There is NERDTree: it completes you (up to the point where you want auto complete for Python/Django, it won’t help for that at all).

What is NERDTree I hear you ask? Let me tell you! NERDTree is a plugin for Vim (and, obviously, gVim) that gives you a tree view of a directory structure in a split buffer to the left of your editable area. It allows you to, drum roll, visually browse for files, create files, open files, create directories, rename files and directories and otherwise enables profound awesome by providing an ncurses’esque interface, via Vim, to your file system.

It looks a bit like this:

Midget NERDTRee, shrunken for your perusal...

NERDTree: I must have it now!

Yes, you must. And you can get it either from here: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1658 or you can download it from me here: NERD_tree.zip

Inside the ZIP file you will find three directories. Copy them (or their content) as indicated. Stat! Of course, I am going to assume you installed the same version of Vim as I did and it installed to ‘Program Files’ but substitute ‘Program Files (x86)’ if you’re lucky enough to have a 64 bit OS. Which I do. So… I am not entirely sure why I am carrying on with the 32 bit explanation… Anyway:

• The contents of directory ‘doc’ gets copied to: ‘C:\Program Files\Vim\vim73\doc’
• The directory ‘nerdtree_plugin’ is copied to ’C:\Program Files\Vim\vim73\’
• The contents of directory ‘plugin’ is copied to ’C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\vim73\plugin\’

Exit Vim and start it up again, if all went well, it will auto load the plugin. But you can’t see it. More to follow. Soon. Of course, if it doesn’t load… dude, seriously, just follow the damn instructions. If the instructions are wrong… nah, couldn’t happen right? Right.

NERDTree: Let the awesome begin!

So, to show a lovely NERDTree, just type the command:

<esc>:NERDTree<enter>

Behold the magnificence of the NERDTree (if you don’t, the case, I bloody meant it when I said it matters)! The buffer containing the tree should have focus so the up and down arrows should work as expected.  Enter will expand a tree or open a file.  Browse around. Open a file. Feel the awesome.

After you open a file, the file buffer will have focus. To get back to the NERDTree press Ctrl+Tab (this will cycle through open buffers… so obviously this is also how you get back to the file buffer). Closing a file with :q! will work as expected, it will leave the NERDTree buffer open with focus so you can browse and open another file. Or not. The quit command (:q!) will work the same way as it does on a file in the NERDTree buffer: it will close it.

NERDTree: Enhance my awesome even moar!

So, that one guy who downloaded my settings file and (epic) colour scheme (that doesn’t work in terminal… oops…) has a little less to do since F2 is already mapped to toggling NERDTree on and off. For the rest of you (and by rest, I mean those of you who don’t already know how to do this (WTF are you reading this for anyway?)), we need to add a couple of things into the settings file. Thankfully, it’s pretty simple. What could possibly go wrong? Nothing. Nothing could go wrong.

Do this:

• Run gVim
• Type the command: <esc>:e ~/_vimrc<enter>

You should now see a glorious Vim settings file. Before you continue, decide which function keys you want to map to where. As I said in my previous post, I map F2 to toggle NERDTree on and off, F4 to open NERDTree in my sandbox directory and F5 to open NERDTree in my Dropbox directory. Decide what you want and substitute the path you want for what I put below. If you don’t understand what I just said… go away. Now.

Add the following lines (assuming they’re not already there) to the bottom of your _vimrc file:

map <F2> <ESC>:NERDTreeToggle<RETURN>
map <F4> <ESC>:NERDTree c:\Sandbox<RETURN>
map <F5> <ESC>:NERDTree c:\Users\shawn\Dropbox<RETURN>

As you can probably guess, ‘map’ means… er… map… <F2> means… er… F2 oh fuckit. You get the point. Change the ‘c:\Sandbox’ and/or ‘c:\Users\shawn\Dropbox’ to whatever you want, or delete the line, or whatever.

Once you’ve done that, save the file and exit (you need to restart Vim… well you could… nah, you need to restart Vim):

<esc>:wq!<enter>

Fire good old gVim up again and you should be good to go! Give her a test drive: F2 should show NERDTree, F2 again should hide it. And the other function keys you mapped should open the directories you configured. If they don’t… just give up now. Delete gVim, it’s not for you. Seriously.

NERDTree: The tree of the future... maybe...

NERDTree: So is that all?

Nein! It is not all! NERDTree does a couple of other awesome things also. Let me tell you them. (All of the following assumes NERDTree is open and has focus).

Pressing ‘r’ will reload the directory tree below the item you’re on.  So if things have changed (new files, new directories) ‘r’ will reload or refresh the tree below the highlighted item and show you these changes.

Pressing ‘m’ will bring up the file management menu. This will allow you to create a file or directory, rename a file or directory or delete the highlighted file or directory.

To accelerate your awesome acquisition, here’s some recipes.

Create a file:

• Focus NERDTree
• Highlight the directory you want to create the file in
• Press ‘m’
• Press ‘a’
• Type the name of the file (test.txt, do not end with a ‘/’)
• Press enter

An empty file with that name will have been created and should be highlighted. Pressing enter again will open that file. Awesome? Yes. Very.

Deleting a file:

• Focus NERDTree
• Highlight the file you want to delete
• Press ‘m’
• Press ‘d’
• Press ‘y’

Like a boss. The file would know who the boss was… if the file wasn’t DEAD. Ah… yea.

Create a directory:

• Focus NERDTree
• Highlight the directory you want to create the directory in
• Press ‘m’
• Press ‘a’
• Type the name of the directory but DO end it with a ‘/’ (for example, type ‘test/’)
• Press enter

Behold! A new directory sees the light of day!

NERDTree: …and in conclusion…

Isn’t NERDTree just the bees knees? The only correct and acceptable answer is ‘YES SIR’. Can you feel the aura of awesome that now surrounds you? That’s right: gVim, using it makes you awesome like a boss.

A black and white still of a water feature in Hamilton, Waikato.

Right, so you’ve heard about Vim. Those who use Vim refuse to use anything else. And, to be perfectly honest, anything else decidedly lacks awesome. Awesome people use Vim. Even on Windows.

Reading Vim tutorials can be scary; they usually start out by telling you that you need to know a bunch of commands before you’re going to get anywhere… and that’s pretty much true. It’s surprising though how quickly you pick it up if you pay attention so I’m going to give you what you need to be awesome quickly. Ok, more awesome than not at all awesome. Which you are now. Not at all awesome. It’s what all people who don’t use Vim are. But we have the technology, we can change that.

There are four things you need to be awesome with Vim on Windows: gVim (obviously), NERDTree (more on that later), an awesome colour scheme and some commands in your head.

Being awesome: gVim and Windows 7

gVim: Getting it

You can download if from here: http://www.vim.org/download.php or you can download it from me here: gVim 7.3

Once you’ve downloaded gVim, you obviously install it. Right? Right.

It installs to Program Files/Vim (or Program Files (x86)/Vim) by default and the executable should be in Program Files/Vim/vim73 (or exchange the number for whichever version you’ve chosen to install).

gVim: The 2 minute intro

Vim works with ‘modes’ which is different from most editors, certainly any editor you generally come across in Windows.

The modes are:

• Command mode: you enter commands to do things (like save and quit)
• Insert mode: type text into text editor
• Visual mode: visually select things, like a sub mode of Insert mode

Right, you’ve run Vim but now what? You can’t type anything!?! That’s because you’re in command mode and you don’t know any commands. To type some text press either ‘i’ or the ‘Insert’ key. If you have a Mac keyboard on your Windows machine and you haven’t re-mapped some keys, use ‘i’. If you do want to re-map some keys (and let me assure you, on a Mac keyboard on Windows, you do), read this: http://shawn.hamman.co.nz/2011/07/getting-shit-done-on-windows-1-make-a-mac-keyboard-useful/

gVim: Typing some stuff

So you’ve pressed ‘i’ or ‘Insert’, now you’re in insert mode. To get out of insert mode, press escape. Press it a couple of times just to be sure. Hammer it. Makes you feel better. Makes you feel good. You’ll find yourself pressing the escape button a lot. In fact, before you do anything in gVim you’re going to find yourself beating the escape button two or three times. This is normal. Learn to live with it. Most people who use Vim beat the escape key repeatedly while thinking. Other awesome Vim users can gauge your level of awesome by the way you obsessively stab at the escape key.

So as you’ve probably guessed by now, the standard process in Vim is: press ‘i’, then type stuff, then press escape (repeatedly). That is the process. Always remember to beat the escape key after typing anything and you’ll do fine.

gVim: Commands and making Vim do your bidding in 5 minutes

Commands in Vim usually start with a colon ‘:’ followed by a letter or a word. Commands are how you do things like save and quit (and a bunch of other stuff but we’ll get there). Pay attention to the case of the letters, they matter. ‘U’ and ‘u’ are not the same thing (‘U’ being Shift+U and ‘u’ being just plain vanilla ‘u’).

To type something and then save it, you would do this:

• Press ‘i’ or Insert
• Type some stuff
• Repeatedly hammer the escape key until you’ve satisfied your OCD that you’re no longer in insert mode
• Press ‘:’
• Press ‘w’ (w is for write)
• Press <space>
• Type a file name, ‘c:\sandbox\test.txt’ for example. Assuming of course you have a ‘c:\sanbox\ directory that happens to be writeable by your user anyway…
• Press <enter>

The command looks something like this:

<esc>:w c:\sandbox\test.txt<enter>

If everything went well, you should have a text file called text.txt in your ‘c:\sandbox’ directory.

Now, if you want to save it again, you just have to type the command below and it will save to the same file:

<esc>:w<enter>

If you want to quit out of Vim:

• Repeatedly hammer the escape key until you’ve satisfied your OCD that you’re no longer in insert mode
• Press ‘:’
• Press ‘q’ (q is for quit)
• Press enter

Vim should be gone. So a quit looks like this:

<esc>:q<enter>

Lets say you want to quit without saving. Vim prefers you to not lose your stuff so Vim will complain that you have un-saved work and Vim wants to be damn sure that you are damn sure that you are willing to throw it all away. To force Vim to do your bidding and quit without saving:

• Repeatedly hammer the escape key until you’ve satisfied your OCD that you’re no longer in insert mode (see where I’m going with this?)
• Press ‘:’
• Press ‘q’ (q is for quit)
• Press ‘!’ (! for force)
• Press enter

Vim, and your work, should be gone. A force quit looks like this:

<esc>:q!<enter>

Of course, you might want to save and quit at the save time, you can combine the Write and Quit commands like so:

<esc>:wq<enter>

To force a write/quit:

 <esc>:wq!<enter>

gVim: A shortcut to more awesome settings and a decent color scheme

Download this zip file: vim_files.zip

It contains two files:  ’_vimrc’ (Vim settings file) and ‘pastafarian.vim’ (a Vim color scheme file). Extract them and copy as follows:

Copy ‘_vimrc’ into your home directory, on Windows 7 default it’s:

c:\Users\<username>\

Copy ‘pastafarian.vim’ to the ‘colors’ directory in your Vim install directory:

c:\Program Files\Vim\vim73\colors\

If you’re in Vim, restart it by exiting and starting it again.

The screen should now be a beautiful dark blue and Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v should be mapped to work as expected on Windows. If it isn’t… come on dude, it’s just copying a couple of files. Seriously.

If you edit the _vimrc file and you scroll to the bottom, you’ll notice I’ve mapped some function keys to NERDTree functions. Worry not, we’ll get to that eventually.

To edit the _vimrc file from Vim:

<esc>:e ~\_vimrc<enter>

gVim: The basic commands you need to be more awesome than not at all awesome

If you’ve installed my settings file and color scheme, copy and paste are Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v respectively, as you would expect on Windows. Also, technically, the escape button isn’t part of the actual command sequence but I put it in because you need to be in command mode to type a command. Beginners forget so you might as well get it right from the beginning.

How to undo (note – no colon and no enter and you can hit ‘u’ as many times as you want after then first <esc>):

<esc>u

How to redo (same thing, one <esc> and as many <ctrl>+r as you want):

<esc><ctrl> + r

Create a new tab:

<esc>:tabnew<enter>

Cycle between tabs (no colon and no enter after command):

<esc>gt

Save (or write) the current file:

<esc>:w<enter>

To quit (and mean it):

<esc>q!<enter>

Go to the end of a word:

<esc>e

Go to the end of a whitespace-delimited word:

<esc>E

Go to the beginning of a word:

<esc>b

Go to the beginning of a whitespace-delimited word:

<esc>B

Go to the beginning of a line:

<esc>0

Go to the first non-whitespace character of a line:

<esc>^

Go to the end of a line:

<esc>$

Go to the first line of the screen:

<esc>H

Go to the middle line of the screen:

<esc>M

Go to the last line of the screen:

<esc>L

Go to a specific line number: <esc>:NN<enter> where NN is a place holder for a number. Go to line 99:

<esc>:99<enter>

Go to line 5:

<esc>:5<enter>

Delete a line:

<esc>dd

Delete from the cursor to the end of a line:

<esc>D

(which is, <esc><shift>+d, no <enter> required)

Delete a bunch of lines: <esc>:dNN<enter> where NN is a place holder for a number.  Delete 5 lines:

<esc>:d5<enter>

Delete 15 lines:

<esc>:d15<enter>

Set line numbers on:

<esc>:set nu<enter>

Set no wrap on:

<esc>:set nowrap<enter>

Search for something: <esc>/PATTERN (where PATTERN is a string or a regular expression). To search for the word ‘root’:

<esc>/root<enter>

To go to the next found instance:

<esc>n

Search and replace can be complicated. This example will assume you want to search for a string, replace with a string in the entire file in one go. Go big or go home. Limits in a search and replace are for small minds. Maybe. Anyway, search for ‘foo’ in a file and replace all occurrences with  ’bar’:

<esc>%s/foo/bar/gc<enter>

a<enter>

That second ‘a’ is for ‘all’. Be a man. Replace the lot… you can always undo with ‘u’ right? Right.

gVim: …and in conclusion…

That’s all for now. In the next post I will cover NERDTree, it is the final key to attaining unimaginable awesome. Unsurprisingly, NERDTree is called ‘plugin 42′ for good reason! It is the answer to… actually, I just made that shit up. NERDTree, it completes you. Seriously.

A black and white still of a water feature in a Hamilton, Waikato public park.

Just a quick (er, light-hearted and funny…)  post on awesome, specs and outsourcing…

Link

I forgot to post this link at the time… we were busy… with art! And technology! And things! So here it is now, the third instalment in our Epic Release Night Video series.

Link

A 2 second exposure at a stream on the Auckland City Walk in the Waitakere Ranges

So I recently (OK, like 6 months ago) acquired a MacBook Pro and it is awesome. As far a portable computers go the hardware is a work of art; there is literally nothing out there at the moment that compares. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) I can’t make myself like OSX (and I have tried, several times) and so I run Windows 7 on my portable computational machine of pure awesome. And it works exceedingly well too, except for one minor issue: there isn’t a freaking ‘Insert’ button anywhere to be found.

This wasn’t that big of a deal, you eventually learn to work around it by pressing weird combinations to get the same result. On a MacBook Pro, to get “Ctrl + Insert” (copy) you need to press “Fn + Ctrl + Backspace” and for “Shift + Insert” (paste) you have to press “Fn + Ctrl + Enter”. You pick that up pretty quickly with a bit of practice.

I recently bought myself a Mac keyboard (OK, two keyboards, one for the office and the other for home, that I use in Windows) because to be perfectly honest, it is also a work of art and it is by far the best keyboard I’ve ever used and let me assure you, I was very attached to my Das Keyboard. The standard Mac keyboard suffers from the same problem as the MacBook Pro: no ‘Insert’ key.

It is entirely possible to live without an ‘Insert’ key on Windows but I spend most of my time using gVim as an editor, Firefox with Vimperator as a browser and the rest of the time I work on Linux terminals through putty. To copy and paste in all of these things, having an ‘Insert’ button is just… easier.

I spent some time searching Google for ways to map some other key on a Mac keyboard to an ‘Insert’ button and found a bunch of things on hot keys and macro’s, none of them were acceptable but fear not, the mission was a success. I did find a program that will help you re-map a key to another key on your beautiful Mac keyboard: “Key Tweak”.

You can download “Key Tweak” for Windows here: http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/ or directly from me here: download Key Tweak

Download it, install it, try not to freak out at the CGA colour scheme and run it. It pops up a screen with a keyboard and a bunch of functions that help you re-map keys. I took the liberty of re-mapping the F13 key to ‘Insert’ since Windows doesn’t care about F13 and it’s close enough to where the ‘Insert’ key is supposed to be to be comfortable.

• Click on the ‘Half teach mode’ button
• Click the ‘Scan a single key’ button
• Press the F13 key
• Select ‘Insert’ from the destination key drop down
• Click ‘Remap’
• Click ‘Apply’
• Restart your computer

And you’re done. Happy days are here again. You might also want to re-map F14 through 19 to ‘Insert’ cos… why let a good key go to waste?

Link

Link

See, she knows I sometimes have…trouble deciding to spend money on gadgets, especially so when I can’t see a clear need for it. So my wife helps me out every now and then by just deciding for me.

She bought me an iPad 2. And it rocks the most.

I saw the usefulness of it early on, especially at work (having your email, calendar and internet connection in every meeting is very useful). What I had trouble with was justifying the cost. Thankfully, I have a wife who removed that particular stumbling block for me with a significant amount of flair.

The iPad is awesome, it really is, I love it. Just a damn shame it runs iOS…

(This is my first iPad blog post and let me tell you, it beats the he’ll out of doing it on a phone)