I use these every single day: noremap <leader>ew :e <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR> noremap <leader>es :sp <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR> noremap <leader>ev :vsp <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR> noremap <leader>et :tabe <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR> These make it much easier to open files next to the file in the current buffer. For instance, if I run the command “vi /etc/puppet/manifests/modules/foo/bar.pp” and I need to edit a file in the same directory as bar.

After a few months of managing my dotfiles with git, I felt the need to organize my vim plugins a little better. I chose to use pathogen (created by Tim Pope), which allows me to keep each plugin in its own subdirectory. It fits well with using git to manage dotfiles because git has two ways of tracking content from other repositories. The first is submodules, which keep a remote URL and commit SHA1 so that the other content can be pulled in after cloning.

I’m sick today. Well, that’s a bit of a misnomer. You see, I don’t get “sick.” I get miserable. Being sick for most people is being laid out in bed with a head full of snot, hacking and coughing and blowing through two boxes of kleenex. Not me. I get miserable. What this usually means is that my nose needs to be emptied on an hourly basis and I have less of an appetite and I usually get tired faster.

I have quite a few dotfiles. I have so many that keeping them in sync is impossible with conventional methods. So, I turned to my old friend: version control. For a while, I kept them in subversion at work. This worked well as that was where I spent most of my time. Recently, however, I’ve wanted those same dotfiles to be available at home and other non-work areas. So, I investigated moving them over to a git repository.

In trying to finish transitioning from my old backup drive to my new backup mini thumper, I ran across a file with this content: -take car in to get checked -order lion king tickets -clean room +do laundry +organize honeymoon continue working on g4g saap psd write more for guestlist application call mom It’s an old todo list. The modification date on the file is 8/10/02. Yup, exactly 8 years before my daughter was born.

I’ve been using git for a while now, and I’m just getting to the point where I can think in it. It’s the same as learning a new spoken language. I took three years of Spanish in high school, so I knew most of the rules and could translate back and forth to English, but I never really learned to think in Spanish (as opposed to thinking in English and then quickly translating).

I’m a big fan of data visualization. Something about taking huge swaths of numbers and reducing them down to a set of conclusions or messages is very intriguing. For a while, I’ve been consuming blogs and articles related to data visualization, so my head is full of theories with not much practice. So here is my feeble first foray into the dataviz space. The data comes from a post on flowingdata.

[Update] It looks like this only really applies to USB flash drives. When I mounted my actual backup drive, it showed up in prtpart. This post was written using the root drive on my old backup server, which is a SanDisk Cruzer flash drive. Now that I finally got my mini thumper up and online, it’s time pull everything from my previous backup drive. The problem is that it’s a USB drive with an ext3 partition on it.

After basically copying my friend’s exact specifications, I now have a little server at home with 1.5T of mirrored disk space. By and large it was a straightforward process, with the following interesting tidbits. Most of the assembly went smoothly. You do have to pull the motherboard out to get the CF drive into its slot. In order to maneuver it out, you have to unclip the SATA cables and unscrew the VGA connector.