Pragmatism in the real world
I'm more of a spaces person than a tabs person when it comes to source code and in Vim, I like to see the tab characters, so I have this setting: set listchars=tab:\⇥\ ,trail:·,extends:>,precedes:<,nbsp:+ This places a handy ⇥ character so that I can see the tabs: I'm currently working on a codebase where the coding style is to use tabs, so I need to change my settings. One option is to use EditorConfig, for… continue reading.
I'm running a UniFi network here with wireless access points, the Security Gateway and a PoE switch. It seems to be a robust system and is almost certainly overkill, but reliability is high on my lists after bad experiences with a NetGear WiFi router. The UniFi system software is called the Controller and runs on a various operating systems. As I have a Mac mini here, I decided to run it on there. Weirdly, however… continue reading.
To test a website that you're developing on your local computer on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet use ngrok. This is the way to do it: Start up ngrok: $ ngrok http my-dev-site.local:80 This will start up ngrok and give you a "Forwarding" URL such as http://24f55bf5.ngrok.io. In this case, it will direct all traffic to that URL to http://my-dev-site.local. If you run your website on a different port, such as… continue reading.
As a mostly keyboard user, I take advantage of the keyboard shortcuts in Sublime Text. However, the sidebar is quite a lot of effort to manage, especially as I mostly leave it closed. Firstly, you need cmd+k,cmd+b to open it. Then you type ctrl+k,ctrl+0 to focus it as opening it doesn't automatically set focus. Then you can navigate to the file you want and open it via pressing return. Finally, you type cmd+k,cmd+b to close… continue reading.
I find myself needing to take screen captures of the currently active window in OS X reasonably frequently. The built-in way to do this on a Mac is to use shift+cmd+4, then press space and then use your mouse to highlight the window and click. For a good proportion of the time, I'm not using a mouse, so this doesn't work great. There's a built-in command line utility called screencapture which requires you to know… continue reading.
Currently, I create presentations using rst2pdf and so I regularly have vim open side by side with the Preview app showing the rendered PDF. I use a Makefile to create the PDF from the rst sources, so I just use :make in vim to rebuild the PDF file and then had to switch to Preview in order for it to reload the updated PDF file. Recently a friend wondered why the PDF viewer couldn't reload… continue reading.
I was delighted to spend an hour chatting with Matt Setter on episode 14 of Free the Geek. In this podcast, we talked about Slim 3 and development in general. Matthew gives me a great introduction (thanks!) and then we delve into the chat. We talk about the importance of semantic versioning as I think this is key to stability in a project. It's not very glamorous to work on code where you have to… continue reading.
As it becomes more painful to use a pointing device for long periods of time, I find myself using vim more and so I'm paying more attention to customisation so that the things I'm used to from Sublime Text are available to me. One thing I'm used to is that when I run the build command on a Markdown file, I expect Marked for Mac to open and render the file that I'm writing. Vim… continue reading.
I currently use rst2pdf to create presentations slide decks from reStructured Text files. I like rST a lot as it's more expressive than Markdown and allows for extension. Tables in rST are marked up like this: +———–+———–+———–+ | Heading 1 | Heading 2 | Heading 3 | +===========+===========+===========+ | a | b | c | | | | | | aa | | | +———–+———–+———–+ | d | e | f | +———–+———–+———–+ | g… continue reading.
I'm still using Ansible to provision Vagrant VMs. This is how I added the XHGui profiler to my standard setup. Theres a number steps we need to do: Install Composer Install the uprofiler PHP extension Install XHGui Set up for profiling Set up host for XHGui website Install Composer Installing Composer requires these tasks: – name: Install Composer shell: curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php — –install-dir=/usr/local/bin creates=/usr/local/bin/composer – name: Rename composer.phar to composer shell: mv… continue reading.
