irb with readline on mac using rvm – vi keystrokes

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One last whack at this problem. I just got email from a reader of this blog. (Well, technically, a reader of Google, which reads everything, so I shouldn’t feel too impressed with myself.) Anyway, he found my blog post and emailed to tell me the problem with my .inputrc, which was that I needed these two lines:

set editing-mode vi
set keymap vi

I already had the former, but it’s probably been 5 years since I learned how to write a .inputrc file, and I must have missed learning then about the latter. So I added it, and it works like a champ!

Black Friday – Mac Office 2011

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I’ve been trying to decide whether to upgrade my old copy of Office.

The problem with Office is that I only use Word. I’ve pretty much switched from Excel to Numbers, and Keynote is so good that it’s been years since I even thought about running Powerpoint.

So why upgrade? Well, I do use Word a great deal. And Word 2008 is so slow that I routinely type ahead of it (e.g., when applying different styles to two paragraphs) and get it confused. That’s when it’s running. But it’s so ridiculously slow to load, I always leave it running. Supposedly, it’s faster now, especially launching. (Opening .DOCX files is faster, but I never use those. I would, if the Antiword folks would support them, but I’m content to stick with .DOC until, well, forever.)

So should I upgrade? Probably. It’s not a slam dunk, but with these newly-announced Black Friday prices I can probably talk myself into it.

Palin piece in NY Times Magazine

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I found the NY Times Magazine profile of Sarah Palin pretty interesting. Here’s one of the reasons:

In truth, few are underestimating Sarah Palin anymore. In that endearing manner of the Beltway echo chamber, the prevailing narrative of Palin in 2009 was that that she was an incompetent ditz. This year’s story line is that she is a social-media visionary who purposefully circumnavigated the power-alley gasbags and thereby constructed a new campaigning template for the ages.

I hate to say I told you so. Well, no, not really. In fact, I love to say I told you so.

Google Refine

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A while ago, Google bought the company that made Freebase, a tool for making sense of messy data. Earlier this week, they released a 2.0 version of that software, now renamed Google Refine. Watch the videos to see what that does.

This looks pretty darned impressive. For great chunks of my career, I’ve been doing work like that the hard way. In the 1980s, I started my career by doing data reduction in Fortran, but quickly graduated to sed and awk, and in the 2000s I used perl and ruby. Of course, when I say “the hard way,” that is in hindsight. Each of those was an improvement over what I used before, and this looks like it could be a similar type of improvement.

(I still do some of that kind of work even now. It’s been a couple of years, but I probably spent at least a week, spread across too many evenings and weekends, massaging the church directory from a text format Word document into tabular spreadsheet data.)

Church Website – Decisions

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I’ve read the tea-leaves and it’s pretty clear to me that Apple has quietly abandoned its iWeb software. Okay. That’s fair; I pretty much abandoned it a long time ago, myself. Whenever I have to make changes to the church web site, I always cringe because it means I have to crank up iWeb and figure out again how it works.

So. That leaves me with the dilemma of how to replace it. On the one hand is the static website. I could throw one of those together using webgen. Perhaps with a few hand-coded extensions using erubis, haml, sass, and a smattering of kramdown.

The problems with that approach are that it would (a) take me forever to get right, especially if I made the error of using semantic markup instead of tables. Not to mention (b) inserting me into every part of the workflow, insuring nobody else could ever take over as webmaster.

Then, on the other hand, there’s a full-fledged CMS like Drupal or Joomla. The price is right, and other people have already done most of the work. I see that plenty of churches have gone this route.

The problem with a CMS is that–wow!–it’s not like setting up a WordPress blog. It’s more like setting up a couple of dozen…or maybe a few hundred. It’s like landing a jet on the Hudson River, or charting out the chronology of the End Times: I know there are people who do that, but I’m not sure I could ever be one of them.

Eurology – Now With the Amazing Flute-Cam!

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I happened on this video earlier while looking for Ian Anderson‘s “Eurology.” This is a very creditable cover version, but what makes it worth watching is the amazing flute-camera the artist (Jackinart) put together.

At first, watching it makes you a little sea-sick, but it’s worth watching to see how a flutist holds their instrument. I always thought there would be more wobble than this, but it’s pretty much rock-steady. Very impressive. And a great song, of course.