LeeMobile

The Mundane:My bike into work has become easier and easier, and after Saturday’s intense mountain biking ride in the hills my quads can handle the commute to work with ease. The hills that were once killer now pale in comparison to the steep inclines I faced on Saturday.

However, I got suckered into subbing for Wei in his basketball rec league yesterday. I haven’t played basketball in over 2 years, but I fit right into our team of beginners. I have never sweat so hard in a very long time and by the end of the game I could wring out a few glasses of water from my t-shirt. Basketball is a lot more intense than from what I remembered. I had an amazingly fun time playing though, despite the fact that our team got steam rolled.

I’m almost 5′8 and I was the tallest player on our team. It’s a mixed league, and we have 3 guys and 3 girls. Our opponents: 5 guys and a 6 foot tall chick. Every player on the other team except 1 was at least 6 feet tall, and they all were really good at basketball. I think Wei’s team was put in the wrong pool/league because we got absolutely destroyed. Final score: 56-17… and we were playing a point per basket.

I’m happy to say that I haven’t felt this active in many summers. I can definitely feel my cardio improving quite a lot, and my endurance is really starting to increase.

I had fun nontheless. This morning I woke up with my legs dead tired, stiff, and sore. I guess this is a good thing; no pain no gain. My legs are gonna be stacked for this Saturday’s extended mountain biking ride. However, being that they haven’t recovered they got even more worked out today at Ultimate Frisbee practice.

Why did I sign up for Ultimate Frisbee again? Oh yes, because I’m a masochist.

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I’ve decided to hit up Bluesfest and buy the all week pass. There’s a show almost every day of the week, so this week will be a musical buffet of all sorts. I can’t wait.

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So my new project is solely Unix based. What’s really annoying though is that the Solaris servers we use have a really poor user interface.

So instead of using the crappy interface made in the 90’s, I interact with the servers purely through the use of the command terminal (essentially similar to a DOS prompt). This is great and all, but what happens when you have to edit a text file from the shell?

You use something called VI (Visual) or it’s evolved incarnation Vim (as in VI Improved). The only problem is that VI is really unintuitive to the beginner user. It’s nothing like Word or Notepad for text editing because there is no mouse, and to boot there’re thousands of commands when hitting the keys. It’s completely daunting and intimidating for a beginner user, and so it turns off most users…such as myself.

My first encounter with VI was in the Computing Science University labs, where I noticed my friend was programming in a shell instead of using a graphical interface like notepad. The keys he was hitting were all weird. To move up he didn’t use the up arrow on the keyboard, and instead he pressed ‘k’, down was ‘j’ and left and right was ‘h’ and ‘l’. Why learn something new when I had a nice notepad-esque text editor… especially something so unintuitive.

However, now that I’m forced to learn how to use VI I don’t think I can turn back. In fact, I’ve installed the Windows version of Vim on my workstation.

Why? No, it’s not because I’m a masochist. It’s because VI and VIM are a lot more efficient and intuitive once you get the hang of it. It took me 90 minutes to walk through the tutorial and practice to use the editor. This sounds weird, because it takes 3 seconds to learn how to use notepad. But upon learning how to use it, I’m completely sold.

All the commands that you would normally use in a text editor are placed effectively in VIM. Need to do a search? Hit the ‘/’ and type in the keyword you want to search. Need to scroll down 4 pages? You can do that in 2 keystrokes by hitting 4 Ctrl N.

Need to shift 5 words right? Hit 5w. Need to scroll to line 455? Press 455 G. Simple, quick, and effective. Now all I have to do is use VIM for the next little while so that it becomes second nature and my geek points will increase.

Give it a try! It’s free and open source.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 6:05 pm and is filed under The Mundane, G33k. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.