I recently switched from Blogger to this new blog (JeffComputes). Blogger is competent and feature-rich however I wanted a bit more control over my blogging platform. The blog is now powered by Pelican, a great static website generator written in Python. The theme is a customized version of fresh by Jui-Shan Liang. The hosting is provided by RamNode and their great VPS lineup. The workflow for writing a post looks like this:

1. All of the …

AsciiDoc is a great markup format for writing notes. In fact, almost all computer-based notes I write are in AsciiDoc; it is simple yet expressive, portable, and most importantly, grepable.

While Vim is my primary tool for viewing AsciiDoc files, looking through the raw text can leave a bit to be desired. Longing for the beautifully rendered output that only an AsciiDoc file can provide, I threw together the following simple (and ugly) Python script …

Welcome to my new blog, JeffComputes. All previous posts have been imported from my old blog, Audiodidactic. This blog is powered by Pelican, allowing me to write content directly as Markdown or AsciiDoc files. I will post a writeup with more information about my blogging process soon. Thanks for reading!

Highlighting in Vim is super useful when trying to quickly see where something is being used. The following commands can be added to your vimrc file to make highlighting a breeze:

"{-- Commands to highlight the word under the cursor without moving the buffer view or cursor. --
" Case sensitive, partial match inclusive.
noremap hi :set hlsearch:let @/=''
" Case sensitive, no partial match.
noremap ho :set hlsearch:let @/='\<\>'
" Case insensitive, partial match inclusive.
noremap hu :set hlsearch …

Some great podcasts covering topics related to software development:

• Ruby Rogues - The topics covered by this show are fairly broad and are applicable even if you are not a Ruby or even a web developer. For example, a recent episode discussed how to learn new skills as a developer. Conversational format; new episodes weekly.
• Coder Radio - Topics tend to be fairly non-technical and mainly revolve around recent news, mobile development and contracting. Conversational format; new …

The following are a few Vim plugins that really boost productivity with this fantastic editor:

• EasyMotion - Makes moving to a specific location a breeze; see it in action here.
• Buffet - My favorite plugin for moving between open buffers.
• CtrlP - Quickly open files within a project directory structure via fuzzy search.
• FuzzyFinder - Fuzzy searching for buffers, files, tags, etc.
• MRU - Simple plugin that shows a list of the most recently used files.

Quick note on using …

Recently I have been playing around with a parsing library for Python called Parsimonious. So far, I have been very impressed with it. Examples can be a bit hard to find; the following is a simple CSV parser:

from parsimonious.grammar import Grammar
from parsimonious.nodes import NodeVisitor

class EntryParser(NodeVisitor):
    def __init__(self, grammar, text):
        self.entry = {}
        ast = Grammar(grammar).parse(text)
        self.visit(ast)
    def visit_name(self, n, vc):
        self.entry['name'] = n …

The Fossil version control software has a few cool features that are somewhat hidden:

• RSS Timeline - Add .rss after a projects timeline URL to get an RSS feed; example.
• Link To Line Number - Add ?ln= to an artifacts URL to link directly to a given line number; example.