One part where I always felt (and still feel) that I could improve on my Vim usage, is when moving around. I don’t use the mouse, I don’t use the arrow keys, but for a while now I felt that spamming hjkl to get from one place to another is not really efficient. To be honest, it is kind of easy to just press down jjjjjjj … to move down lines. Went a bit too far? Just kk back. But there has to be a better way.

It’s been a while since I last made something with PyQt, so I decided to check out what’s it like nowadays. I’m curious to see what’s new in Qt5 and how does it differ from Qt4. Qt5 also can run under python 3 so I figured to give it a try.

Trying to automate things on my server, I ended up needing read-only for one group of my bitbucket repos and read-write access to another group.

One problem with unit testing legacy applications is that the code has new statements all over the place, instantiating new objects in a way that doesn’t really makes it easier to test the code.

This week I got myself a new laptop, a Thinkpad T540p. One of the features it has is that the battery’s life can be prolonged by setting custom charging thresholds.

This one was a bit weird and needed some figuring out. Xdebug profiler output files were not being generated in the /tmp directory.

I started using vim 3, 4 years ago. The way I use it is that I started out with no plugins and with a handful of lines in .vimrc. It is far too easy to cram all kind of stuff into it and then get lost in the myriads of key combinations. To prevent that, I decided to slowly add in bits and pieces I find lacking in my day to day usage of vim. Also allows me to first learn the editor and later the plugins.

In the past month and a half I had the pleasure of attending not one, but two developer conferences in Croatia’s capital Zagreb. Both conferences are community organized, by people who apparently know what they are doing, as I only have words of praise for them.

When I was just starting out learning programming, everything was so simple. I did not care about design patterns and best practices and unit tests and how will users use that piece of code. Hell, I did not even know those things exist. I was having fun, I was learning, I was free to do whatever I wanted to do, I was playing, I was like a child. Not that there is something wrong caring about those things now, but then I was able to put out a piece of code that was fixing a core of one problem I had and that was it. Once I was done with that, I would move on to the next problem. For a long time now I was missing that feeling of not caring, just fix the damn problem and move on. Just to slap together some crappy piece of code, use it once or twice and then forget about it.

I am running Fedora 17 on my laptop, and yesterday there were some packages to update. Nothing unusual, updates on Fedora are quite frequent and, up until yesterday, there was not a single problem I remember with any update. And it was a small update, four packages in total. What could possibly go wrong, right?