Nick Parker

Vim + Firefox = Vimperator

nickp — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:39:00 -0500

Okay, so I've lamented about how I enjoy using Vim/gVim several times now. If you are still using notepad.exe as your text editor I strongly advise you to check out some of the other editors out on the market. Vim and Emacs tend to be near the top of the list, are full of features and are both extensible. The bottom line is that you need to find an editor, learn it and use it - it's that simple. In fact Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt discuss this in The Pragmatic Programmer. So, while I enjoy using the keystrokes within Vim to navigate text, what about web browsing - we all do that quite a bit these days? The mouse is the obvious choice, however it is not my only option. Enter Vimperator, suggested by Zed, a Firefox addin that allow your browser to act like Vim.

A quick introduction, once you have it installed I like to turn a few things back on so that it still feels like a normal web browser for the times when I actually do want to use my mouse. Like Vim, Vimperator is configurable through a file you can create titled "_vimperatorrc" which needs to be stored within your %userprofile% directory. This file allows you to customize the way Vimperator integrates with Firefox, etc. Below I have included the contents of my _vimperatorrc file to get you started.

"Turn the menu and toolbar on.
:set guioptions+=mT

"Turn off the show tabs by default.
:set showtabline=1

"Turn session tracking off.
:set! browser.startup.page=1

"Allow user to click in address bar.
:set! browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll=true
:set! browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll=true

"Map Ctrl + n for new windows
:map <C-n> <C-v><C-n>

"Map Ctrl + t for new tabs
:map <C-t> :tabopen<Enter>

"Map paste operation normally.
:imap <C-v> <C-v>

After you create this file you will need to restart Firefox and then the settings with be loaded. Standard navigation include:

j - down one line.
k - up one line.
o - open URL.
shift + h - navigate back 1 step in browser history.
shift + l - navigate forward 1 step in browser history.
f [number] - opens a link based on the number displayed on screen.
shift + f [number] - opens a link based on the number displayed on the screen (new tab).
gg - go to top of page.
shift + g - go to bottom of page.
ctrl + f - navigate down one screen length.
ctrl + b - navigate up one screen length.
b [number] - switches to the buffer (tab) based on the number supplied.
/[word] - search for [word], n goes to the next occurance, shift + n to the previous occurance.

If you want to read about the other options you can hit F1 or type :help. You can grab a nightly build here. One thing I didn't like about the default configuration within Vimperator was that it would track your session, so when you would close your browser, the next time you open Firefox, the site you were on was reloaded. There are keyboard commands that will not save your session (i.e., ZQ), however there are many times I will simply close the Firefox window by mouse (old habits die hard). Above in my configuration file I have turned off the session tracking. I have found my web navigation experience has increased dramatically with this, and my reliance on the mouse continues to decrease. Let me know if you decide to give it a try, it will defintely be worth your time.

Vim Tip of the Day - File Explorer Navigation

nickp — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:17:00 -0500

I don't know how I didn't come across this before, but when using the file explorer built into Vim, you can tell Vim to automatically switch the working directory to the current file you are editing. Normally in Vim if you performed a ":cd c:\projects\blah" and subsequently navigated three folders deeper to edit a file (say “c:\projects\blah\foo\bar\foobar\fun.cs”), then choose to go back into the file explorer from your current location by issuing ":e .", the "c:\projects\blah" will be listed, not exactly where you might expect to be. If you edit your _vimrc file and put the following command in when navigating the file explorer window, your current directory will automatically be set based on the file you are editing, and thus we would be dropped back into "c:\projects\blah\foo\bar\foobar").

autocmd BufEnter * lcd %:p:h

Microsoft Mocking Framework and TypeMock

nickp — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:11:00 -0500

While everyone has been wondering over the past couple years when Microsoft would ship its own version of a mocking framework, as of yesterday TypeMock announced it has been acquired by Microsoft and the product will be included in future versions of Visual Studio. At least they didn't follow their previous pattern and create a less powerful clone of other products already on the market. Hmm, interesting this should be me thinks. Next to follow, possibly a DynamicProxy2 clone from Microsoft? What day is today again?

Creating Objects - Round 3

nickp — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:08:00 -0500

Ayende has been discussing the different ways of actually creating objects in .NET and the perf cost associated to each of them. I thought I'd add to the mix one more method, using the DLR. I've talked to several people who have identified concerns with the speed of the DLR so I found the results rather interesting. The context is still the same, identify the time it takes to construct one million Created instances.

The delegate:

delegate Created CreateInstance(int num, string name);

The structure:

    public class Created
    {
        public int Num;
        public string Name;

        public Created(int num, string name)
        {
            Num = num;
            Name = name;
        }
    }

Grab the constructor:

ConstructorInfo ci = typeof (Created).GetConstructors()[0];

Define the parameters to be passed to the constructor (relative to the code block we are about to define):

Variable num = Variable.Parameter(SymbolTable.StringToId("num"), typeof (int));
Variable name = Variable.Parameter(SymbolTable.StringToId("name"), typeof (string));

Build a code block with the Ast factories for building expressions (this builds our function for creating new Created instances with our parameters):

CodeBlock block = Ast.CodeBlock("CreateInstance", typeof (Created),
Ast.Return(Ast.New(ci, new Expression[] {Ast.Read(num), Ast.Read(name)})),
new Variable[] {num, name}, new Variable[0]);

Compile our block:

CreateInstance create_instance = TreeCompiler.CompileBlock<CreateInstance>(block);

Invoke the compiled instance:

int iterations = 1000000;
Stopwatch watch = Stopwatch.StartNew();
for (int i = 0; i < iterations; i++)
{
create_instance(i, i.ToString());
}

The results are rather impressive, the run time on my machine was 00:00:00.2737688. It looks like creating objects within the DLR via a dynamic code block is pretty cheap. I've included the source here if you want to run the example. The DLR bits are based off a release from CodePlex two days ago, the RubyForge bits are much older and will not compile with the above code. Thoughts?

Vibrant Ink for Visual Studio 2008

nickp — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 10:35:00 -0500

For those of you that enjoy the Vibrant Ink theme that was originially produced for Textmate, John Lam converted it to work under both Vim and Visual Studio 2005 a while back. I've enjoyed that for both editors, however with Visual Studio 2008 out, we need to update. I've updated the settings file to now work with Visual Studio 2008. Feel free to download it here.

Code to Live Video from Tulsa TechFest

nickp — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:09:00 -0500

Jeffrey Palermo and I sat down with Chris Koenig while at Tulsa TechFest back in October to chat about the new ASP.NET MVC stack. Josh Holmes just published an extract of our conversation out on Channel 9 here. This was recorded back in October, right after the ASP.NET MVC stack was first made public by Scott Guthrie down at the ALT.NET conference in Austin, TX. We discussed other things such as the open source movement and it's relationship to the Java counterpart but they didn't make the cut in the editing room. You can watch the video directly here. Have you played with the new MVC stack yet, if so what do you think?

Happy New Year

nickp — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:21:00 -0500

Happy New Year everyone! I've been having some issues with my server recently, so if this post makes it out there all the better. I just received notification from Microsoft this morning that I have received my MVP award for 2008. I look forward to seeing everyone up in Seattle this coming April. I am planning on blogging more this year. We have been absurdly busy at work, but there are a lot of little nuggets I am looking forward to sharing. Until next time...

The Pitfalls of Concession

nickp — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:45:00 -0500

Ayende recently posted about a design aspect of the new MVC framework coming down from Microsoft. Ayende raised concern about the design requirement of attributing your public actions on a controller. He points out that Rob Conery has a 6 page post covering the usage of a tool to mask the pain involved in typing the excess noise. A follow-up by Phil Haack presents a solution through subclassing that allows one to avoid the attribute. What about composition instead?

The real reason behind this post is not to discuss the merit of a design decision directly, but the more off-handed results that come from it. If Microsoft is protecting the developer from making mistakes by requiring an attribute here and there within a controller, well, why wouldn't they protect the developer all over the place? Where does one draw a line in the sand from a design perspective? If we made a concession before, can we use that as justification for yet another design decision that might change the direction of the software even further? While the CTP is baked, the API can still change and Microsoft is listening, pipe up if you care to share your opinion.

ALT.NET Super Summary

nickp — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:30:00 -0500

It's simple in my opinion: Spreading pragmatic .NET

I wasn't there, however that's my interpretation of the vision. I think one of the core competencies any developer needs to espouse is passion. Passion is at the root of being a pragmatic developer, regardless of whether or not you’re doing .NET/Java/Ruby/LISP, etc. We are going through a hiring phase at work right now, during the interviews, passion is one of the top characteristics that I look for in a candidate. Passion is a catalyst for being pragmatic. Where does your passion lie?

NHibernate Performance

nickp — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 12:17:00 -0500

I am doing some research into the use of NHibernate over the use of the current data access layer we use at work. Overall, the results are very good compared with what we current had in place (lazy loading all properties, limited caching strategies to name a few), however I'm curious if anyone wants to ring in on past experience they have had with NHibernate. Our DBA is concerned that we will be losing out on cached execution plans from SQL Server by moving to NHibernate from stored procedures. It is my understanding that parameterize SQL can be just as fast, any comments?

Common Lisp

nickp — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:28:00 -0500

For those of you interested in functional languages (I know Jeremy is), APress has decided to give away it's PDF version of the book Practical Common Lisp for free. Go get it here.

UPDATE: The URL has been updated for the free book download.

Castle Presentation

nickp — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 14:09:00 -0500

I will be presenting at the September Iowa .NET User Group meeting, if you don't have any plans September 5^th come on out for some free pizza and a presentation on the Castle MicroKernel/WindsorContainer. I will be giving an introduction to the dependency inversion principal, and then we will jump into MicroKernel and the extensions that have been built on top of MicroKernel to create WindsorContainer. My final demo will include a custom facility to extend WindsorContainer that will provide integration with the memcached distributed object caching system. I hope to see you out there!

DLR Scores

nickp — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:16:00 -0500

In the constant battle for staying ahead in the software world, Microsoft appears to have a slight edge from the dynamic language perspective. The DLR is being created to support the various dynamic languages that Microsoft intends on releasing, IronPython and recently IronRuby with a dynamic version of Visual Basic in the future (this reminds me of VBScript and the VARIANT data type - sigh).

Microsoft hasn't exactly been on the forefront of dynamic languages, Smalltalk has been around for over 25 years. However what does appear to be changing is the way languages and platforms operate and target themselves. It's all about the VM anymore, period, and the services it can provide. The DLR is being built to provide these new and future languages with a core set of services that make targeting the CLR easier from a dynamic perspective. JRuby has been a work in progress for the past five years in which users can use Ruby to target the JVM. JRuby isn't the only dynamic language attempting to target the JVM, there's Jython and Groovy to name a few. Of course what comes from this is the same problem Java has been plagued with for years, there are hundreds of different solutions/frameworks/tools/libraries available for you to choose from for your project. In order to avoid this duplication of effort, a new project has been created called the JVM language runtime as a mechanism to avoid the duplicated efforts of the historical past. To that I say Microsoft is ahead of the game - touché.

IronRuby Emerges

nickp — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:57:00 -0500

So John Lam annouced the alpha release of IronRuby, he mentions that they did a lot of work on string and arrays, unfortunately, with the current release .NET types aren't able to execute Ruby mixins. I was hoping to do something like the following:

require 'mscorlib' 

require 'System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'  



list = System::Collections::ArrayList.new

list.Add(5) 

list.Add(10)

list.Add(15)

list.extend Enumerable

list.each {|i| puts i.to_i}



The following code does execute:



require 'mscorlib'

require 'System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'

require 'System.Drawing, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' 

require 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'



Application = System::Windows::Forms::Application

Form = System::Windows::Forms::Form

Button = System::Windows::Forms::Button

Point = System::Drawing::Point 

Size = System::Drawing::Size 

MessageBox = System::Windows::Forms::MessageBox  

window = Form.new window.text = 'Testing IronRuby' 

window.size = Size.new(250, 200)

button = Button.new 

button.text = 'Click Me' 

button.location = Point.new(75, 75)

button.click {|sender, e| MessageBox.show 'I was clicked'}

window.controls.add(button)

Application.EnableVisualStyles

Application.run(window)

Of all the windowing toolkits I've seen for Ruby, the .NET Framework is the easiest to read for me, although I'm sure toolkits like Swiby will get noticed, especially due to it's DSL syntax which is the new hotness in the development world these days. Next up, extending the IronRuby Builtins.

EventWaitHandle.Set

nickp — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 22:18:00 -0500

This blog has been pretty quiet lately, what's going on, has Nick fallen asleep? Nope, I've just been busy wrapping a few things up. Most importantly, I got married on June 2nd, and we took a few weeks off to head down to Hawaii and relax. If you've never been, my recommendation is to skip Maui and head right for Kauai.

I will be presenting at the Cedar Rapids User Group on January 7, giving my presentation on Castle's MicroKernel/Windsor Container, so if you are interesting in hearing more about the light-weight IoC container come on out. My presentation starts with an introduction to the IoC concepts and progresses through extending the container via custom facilities.

Last but not least, last year my boss Eric Jacobs got Levi Rosol and I involved in the Ankeny Summerfest cardboard boat regatta. Last year we didn't quiet make it too far past the starting line, however we took notes and gave it another attempt this past weekend. Results - Success, we made it down and back without sinking, a major step forward. Next year I plan to build a boat that will last longer than a single run, however we will do it in Eric's style by only beginning the construction two nights in advance. :-) My wife recorded the event, take a look: