I was thinking I knew quite a lot about VIM but guess what? I do not! 🙂

A few days ago I was doing a few repetitive steps on multiple files and at times I exited VIM (oh, who knows why!) and lost the history. So knowing the awesome power of VIM I knew there had to be some way… I ended up going to #vim for some help and up comes the topic of the command-line editing window. You can add, edit, or delete commands using the normal VIM editing power and re-run the sequence of commands. Here is a tip on vim.org with a little more information and below is a screenshot.

Some people are wondering what I have been up to. Well, basically I have found a few new interests and still working on the details on how much time I want to spend on each. These new interest include an almost-daily workout, much more involving motorcycle rides, becoming more of a do-it-yourself person, and an uber active social life compared to the past few years. For instance a few weeks ago I changed the spark plugs and oil on my motorcycle for the first time! Also, last weekend I went to Home Depot to get stuff for building a cabinet for the stereo system and the DVD player, which I ended up giving up on because of the initial investment and it was not very practical since I do not have a garage (for cutting the wood, etc.).

Additionally this week I learned about shifting gears on the motorcycle without using the clutch. This is still a very new concept to me and I still trying to figure out if cluthless shifting is good or bad for the motorcycle. From the research the I have done so far I haven’t been able to find any one answers; there are people that are all for clutchless shifting claiming that this is one of the characteristics of real motorcycle riders, and then there are people that say "NO, THERE IS NOTHING WORST YOU CAN DO TO YOUR BIKE!!!!"

Hahaha… here is an example of what keeps me busy. I almost left this post and went to do some more research on clutchless shifting! 🙂 So other than that I have been spending a lot of time in the gym, I am up to the point where I can spend almost two hours without realizing. Which also means that probably the only thing that I will be doing when I get home is sleep! 🙂

Oh and then there is also the DVR/PVR (Digital Video Recorder/Personal Video Recorder) project that I have been doing research on. Currently I am trying to decide whether I should invest money in a good video card with an S-Video port or if I should just get a fairly small sized mini-ITX motherboard that has an in-built process (933MHz, I think) and a TV-Out port. The price difference is about $80 but I know in the near future I will have to upgrade the motherboard/processor because the 533MHz overclocked processor with 512MB RAM just isn’t going to cut it for a DVR/PVR.

I am starting to dislike T-Mobile. They have the best plans (even if you are out of their local coverage area) but I am starting to see a lot of problems with what they say and what they actually do. First of all they started charging for international text messaging which used to be free, without any obvious notice. I say that because even though they did send a paper saying that "they charge $0.15 for international text message" with the bill when they started charging but that paper was just like all the other advertisements that they include in their bills and not an obvious notice.

Other than that they usually can’t keep track of exceptions. Exceptions like the $200 cancellation fee for the second line, which I just saw on this months bill. I was told that they wouldn’t charge any cancellation fees because I had moved out of their coverage area and one of the operators had already told me that they wouldn’t. Even after talking to them and going through their cancellation department, letting every operator that came in the way know about that fact, they still charged me the $200. Now I am going to have to take 20 minutes tomorrow and take care of this. This is just annoying! Hopefully they will take the $200 off otherwise I will be really, really angry! 🙁

To add to the list of bad things about T-Mobile: a friend of mine just moved from Chicago (IL) to Madison (WI) and had T-Mobile. Just to make sure that all her free minutes would still work she talked to the T-Mobile customer service representatives; in fact she told me that she asked two reps and they both said that everything would still be the same. During that time I was actually looking for another plan and she was bragging that her T-Mobile was still working. So I called T-Mobile and asked them and the rep told me that the free minutes would still work!

Guess what happened when the bill for the month came? They had counted each and every minute that was supposed to be free. I am not saying that they shouldn’t have charged, all I am saying that they should have at least give out the correct information. Luckily I hadn’t cancelled my current account and signed another contract by then. So you better watch out because T-Mobile isn’t always telling you what they will end up doing!

Lately I have had some time to think about life and its purpose so after spending some time thinking on mine today I decided to look around the internet and see what was out there. In my search I ended up at this site: Health, Wealth & Happiness. It has very interesting content, for starters checkout the article titled "How to Know What Your True Purpose in Life is." Also there is another interesting article titled "I want the Earth Plus 5%"; it does not have anything to do with the my original goal but it sure is quite interesting.

I am always looking for ways of making my "computing environment" better and more efficient. A friend of mine (Ryan Doom) pointed out how rarely we used the Caps Lock key suggesting that I should assign the backspace key to it. This sounded like a good idea because right now I have to reach so far out to get to the backspace key (top-…….-right-……-hand corner…) so I decided to give it a try… In order to assign the backspace key to the caps lock key in Microsoft Windows you have to modify a registry key. Don’t worry because SharpKeys can make this a breeze, with SharpKeys you don’t have to know either the key codes nor the HKEY_BLAH/BLAH/BLAH…

By now I have been using my keyboard with the new assignment for a few months and got really used to it. I had to revisit this a few days ago when I decided to try out linux much more thorougly than I had before. Doing this assignment in linux was a little more work because I had to modify the keyboard layout file for console and then do another reassignment for X. Below is what I did to accomplish these two tasks; I am using Arch Linux with the default QWERTY layout so you might have to do a few things differently depending on the distro that you prefer…

To change the default keyboard layout

1. cd to /usr/share/kdb/keymaps/i386/qwerty
2. Copy the us.map.gz to a new file myus.map.gz

3. Edit myus.map.gz using your favorite editor and change the line keycode 58 = Caps_Lock to keycode 58 = BackSpace
4. Change the default keyboard layout file that will be used by editing /etc/rc.conf and changing the line that says KEYMAP=us to KEYMAP=myus

This will change the default layout for consoles, you can load the new layout immediately by running the command loadkeys myus otherwise the default layout will be loaded when you restart the computer. Now to change the layout in X

1. Create a file called .xmodmap in your home directory with the following code

! Swap Caps lock and backspace.
remove lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = BackSpace

2. If you are already in X then just run xmodmap ~/.xmodmap. If not then start your favorite desktop environment and run that command.

I presonally prefer KDE and am still working on finding the best way to automatically run the xmodmap command when KDE starts. So far I have created a file that runs this command in the ~/.kde/Autostart but that didn’t seem to work. I will do some more research and post an update once I get it figured out.

2005-04-28: You can easily install the keymap in debian using the install-keymap command.

Finally my website is back online, what took so long? Well, firstly I was in the process of moving from Michigan to Wisconsin, a six hour drive and then I have been debating whether to host the website at home or get it hosted somewhere. Hosting at home would have costed me a 12 month commitment to a 1.5Mbps/512k DSL service and a few extra bucks, whereas by getting it hosted somewhere I can get 3Mbps service at home with no commitment (with a few ports blocked). I ended up not hosting the website at home because that seemed like the better option. Surely I won’t have as much control as I did before but after thinking about this I guess I won’t mind that too much (atleast for now).

Lately I have been very busy messing with Linux and setting up things here and there. I think I am getting much better at it and getting a hang of the whole deal. All of this has costed me quite some time and here is my justification for it: I am a computer scientist and this is a computer :). You might ask why not do all this on Windows? Bottomline, Windows is much easier. For the first timers setting up wireless in Linux can take quite some time (~four or five hours) but by the time you are finished you will know quite a lot about; how wireless internet works, terminology, etc. After my last experience I think I know whats going on and I can probably setup wireless in a few minutes. Note that your mileage will definitely vary because there are way too many variables. Oh well, on to the next task.