I’ve previously looked at vim as my primary editor before but have always run into the steep learning curve. With it’s vi heritage (and my utter abhorance of vi) it’s always been a tough sell for me. Even given the number of good references vim has received from people I have avoided it.

This time the difference was the time that “Grant”:http://www.grantbow.com spent with me earlier this evening walking me thru setting up some ‘’sane” defaults. There is still the issue of the vim not being in an edit mode by default – vim/vi seems to be in command mode by default. But I’m sure that can be changed :) as it seems that *all* options can be changed in the .vimrc

Lainens and I watched /Looney Toons: Back In Action/ tonight and man was it funny. I love Brendan Frasier and Jenna Elfman and the work they’ve done recently and now combined they were very funny. Oh! And did I mention Steve Martin is also in it :) I don’t think there is a single movie he has done that I haven’t seen and not liked.

In case you haven’t noticed — we enjoyed the movie.

Last night, and it looks like tonight, have been great weather-wise. A bit of rain and temperatures in the mid-60’s (F). Except for the power failure last night it would have been great sleeping weather :)

Around 0130 everything got really silent and then the UPS alarms all started to sound off – the power was out. Now I have plenty of batteries to keep the core systems running but if I’m in the area I like to shutdown systems to be safe. So I started to shutdown the different computers: WinXP game box, Win2k build system, FreeBSD build box (argh! right in the middle of an upgrade), power switch that protects the audio-visual gear and the switch that turns off the secondary hubs.

Next came the main servers, another Win2k system and the Debian box — the Win2k box shut down just fine but for some reason I had moved the flat-panel monitor off of the UPS circuit so now I couldn’t “see” the Debian box! I turned-on the powerbook and ssh’d to the box to start the shutdown and started to figure out where I moved the monitor power cable so I could see when the shutdown was done.

The moral of the story is two points: always undo a “temporary” power move and label the power cords so when you pull what you think is the power cable for the monitor you don’t power down the server in the middle of a shutdown sequence!

doh!

I think it’s time to move the Debian box into the basement. I had been using it as my primary linux box but now that I have the powerbook I think I’ll make it into a true server. That will also minimize the chance I decide to unplug it again ;)

I found out the hardway, just now, what happens when the Finder app locks-up :)

The Mac way to stop an app by pressing command-option-escape to bring up the ”Force Quit” dialog didn’t work. Killing the Finder process didn’t work and pressing the power button to pop the ”Shutdown, Sleep, Restart” dialog up didn’t work …

phooey

However, I did notice that I still was able to launch programs. So I figured let me see how much of BSD is actually in OS/X. All of it it seems — so far as I can see :)

So, guess what happens when you run a couple continous build process’s and don’t check on them for a couple days? Well you run out of disk space :)

Came home today, opened the powerbook to check my mail, and was surprised to see no new messages. Now if you know me and my habit of subscribing to every mailing list I’m even partially interested in, you will understand that I was a little perplexed at the “no new messages” beep that Mail.app was giving me :)

First I checked to see if my home mail server was up – it was. Next I checked to make sure my host was still up – it was.

Ok that is odd.

So next I checked for any error logs and then I saw the clue – one of the daemons didn’t have any updates for most of the day and that prompted df -h

100% used on /home

Luckily I run a couple different partitions so the system kept running but just couldn’t delivery anything to the home directories – doh!

Needless to say I am cleaning directories right now – I’m amazed at the number of project tarballs I have and old copies of web sites and other data.

Lainen’s father has a cat, Onyx, that has been with him since she was a kitten (some 17 years now) and for the last couple days she has been throwing up soon after eating — so this morning we took her to the vet to see what’s up. The only thing the vet could find wrong was that she is a bit dehydrated and her stool seemed hard so they gave some sub-cutanious (sp?) fluids and told us to start giving her some Metamucile daily. Tomorrow they will get the blood work back to see if anything else is lurking inside her.

Today at work was another “let’s change direction and prepare for an installation” day.

*joy*

At home lainens is really worried about one of her long time friends – she’s been in the hospital where they are trying to stabilize her so they can take a look at a possible hemmorage (sp?) in her head. So with that worry and now the worry with Onyx she is in a funk. :(

On the code side of the fence, a “project”:http://www.once.net.nz/ friend pointed me to “libtc”:http://libtc.sourceforge.net/ that has a configuration file reading/parsing set of routines all written in C with no other dependencies — sweet. It even keeps any comments that are in the file when it writes any new information back out. I had been planning on paper a set of routines that would do the same and was going to use bison and the like to generate a parsing engine but as usual someone else on the internet has already done it.

Now to rip out some very ugly config handling code in dircproxy that has been preventing us from allowing dynamic reloading of values.