C is a beautiful language.

Many people, upon hearing me say this, have undoubtedlyoptical communications pulled out their own vitriolic reasons why I’m wrong. Usually complaints revolve around ridiculous things such as C’s lack of garbage collection or explicit memory management, the existence “confusing” pointers or the general lack other similar abstractions which are indeed missing from C.

So, I am posting this from my HTC G1. Android is pretty amazing, particularly after you jailbreak it and install debian into a chroot.

I will post a proper blog post on it later

Some time in early 2008, I began to be introduced to the vim editor. For those of you that haven’t used it, vim (VI iMproved) is a modal editor that relies on highly efficient keyboard shortcuts to get the job done, and also includes a variety of standard programmer editor features such as completion, syntax highlighting, regexp and so forth. It’s also quite extensible, although not quite as extensible as say, emacs.

Anyway, vim was my first introduction to software that wasn’t designed as a first priority to be easy to use, but rather software that was designed, first and foremost, to be efficient.

After I began using vim for a while, I began noticing inefficiencies in other things I was doing. Using a mouse is slow, generally. Graphical file managers are not nearly as well suited to bulk tasks (although they are suited rather well to performing operations on a set of files with no similarity in their naming scheme, however if you need to do that often you should organise your files better). Because of my use of a GUI, my boot times slowed considerably.

And so, I began replacing these components, bit by bit, with software that worked and worked fast.
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Well, the election of Barack Obama has certainly fired up some spirits and injected a fresh burst of optimism into the world. But what has really changed?

Certainly this appears to be the new mantra of the leftist media (the right wing media appear to have just completely lost their ability to connect two logical points with reasonable explanation). I dispute the idea that is now emerging among my leftie friends, who insist that Barack Obama doesn’t represent the sort of sufficient change that progressives have been looking for.

Obama never promised a revolution, and he is now, according to his word, not delivering one. Many in the left appear to have projected their vision of an ideal society onto Obama’s vision, and therefore become disappointed when they realise he won’t turn the world into a lush socialist paradise.
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It seems as though it’s possible for me to link my blog with my facebook notes, which means i’m going to be using my blog alot more often nowadays.

be prepared.

i have released one of my many projects, the vtoo terminal control library.

Click the link to go to the page:

in the rabid pastures where the poppies grow i see the bald eagle come to its resting place. the majestic beauty of pollutants fills the sky with activity and bustle. the detective walks down the alley way just like the noir films and then maybe it will pan out to a cityscape with all the cars trundling by. the world’s more modern than that, though, i try and picture it, there are a thousand cities with a thousand cars in a grand orchestrated dissonance that always seems further away from you the closer you get. but really amidst all the inflated crap there is just one little man with one little dream and a whole lot of shit to wade through, but sometimes that crap is just enough to lift the little man up and wow look at his ego expand the bustling starts again and i breathe in all those pollutants. more more more build build build eat eat eat die die die all ways three times the charm the greatest of these is always the firmament - in ownership we are fulfilled. the grand chorus of the rhine stops and in comes the grand progress of humanity. we’re beyond that now, we’re beyond anything you can fathom. let’s build our spaceships and let’s build our atom bombs, our relationships and our reality tv - perhaps they will take as further than the spaceships - the great quest of humanity to get off this fucking rock and into somewhere interesting - but how interesting is that, other rocks are alot more boring than this one, let me tell you, or maybe we will die in the might of a thousand suns, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one - what’s that from again? the bhagavad gita? we’ve gotta sound like we know what we’re talking about when the world comes crumbling down around us in a glorious crucible of progress. let’s watch the fireworks tonight honey it’ll look great and it will amuse us for a while, whadda ya say? the grand spiritual quest is always just like on tv, and we’ll live to see the end of it all one day, don’t you think? oh well, that’s all for now, look up once in a while, the world is alive.

my stream of consciousness poetry while listening to the greatest piece of modern music i’ve heard - the third movement from the harmonielehre by John Adams. Just stunning.

Link here:

linkie