The VIM Man's New Project: A-A-P.

Interesting.  The man behind VIM, the leading VI replacement in the world, is now working on a replacement for Make. 

OSDir: So, can you tell us what A-A-P is in plain English that even this dumb Canadian can anderstand?

Bram Moolenaar: This is going to be a long answer, since A-A-P includes so much. Assuming that you know the "make" program, I can say that the core item of A-A-P is kind of a super-make. You can write a recipe and execute it with the "aap" program. The recipe contains variable settings and dependencies like a Makefile. So far no surprises, even the syntax is almost the same. Then add to that the power of Python script. This mixes with Makefile syntax very well, the comments start with a '#' and indents are used to form blocks of commands. And then add a number of commands that allow you to access the internet, perform CVS functions and much more. [ Go ]

And if you think that "The VIM Man" is a reference to a bad Lea Thompson movie then you would be right.  [ Go ]

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A New Approach to Permalinks

The Boston Diaries has an interesting approach to PermaLinks.  It's based on Ted Nelson's Tumbler concept and makes what looks like a standard directory reference into a range queryable concept.  Very cool.  [ Go ]

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O'Reilly's OS Dir ... Are they Smoking Crack?

I was on O'Reilly's OSDir yesterday and saw a reference to the Midgard Content Management System which was linked to an article on CMSWatch.  An article published on 2001-10-10.  That's 13 months ago.  Huh?  Was the editor doing crack or did he miss the very obvious date right in the upper left hand side of the page.

And lest you say that I'm just in a pissy mood today (which I am), I noticed this yesterday and was going to blog it when my life became in need of the aforementioned Goat Sacrifice.  (But I did add this to my blog of All Rants, All the Time [ Go ]).

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God you suck Internet Explorer.  You just suck dirty toads.  Sorry for the burst of venom and bile but I had my usual 15 odd windows open and was trying to blog a bunch of things and my system just got slower and slower and slower.  So I had to go thru the old "Note URL.  Close Window.  Repeat" sequence of events.  Which is just utterly and completely lame.  So then I had to terminate two misbehaving IE processes and everything was fine.  But it still sucks. 

Note to Self: Use IE Less.  Use Mozilla More.  Do Not Send Bill G a Christmas Card this Year.

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Marketing 101: Bad Product Names of the Year: HardCore Web Content Management And P.I.S.S.

At least in the U.S. the term "hardcore" generally references either someone who is very focused / enthusiastic on an area or an explicit adult video.  Or it's a punk band / punk music.  So why do you want to name your content management system this? Take a look at the Google ads that come up when you query for it. [ Ads ]  [ Product ]  Oh and then I found the Perl Intranet System Services or as they call it "P.I.S.S.".  Oh that's a good name.  Yeah right.  It might be a fun name but can you see the meeting?  "Ah... Boss, I'd like to implement PISS for our Intranet.  " Boss: "SMACK !  Off with your head!  It's Microsoft SharePoint for us".

Recommendation: BEFORE you ever name a product, google for the name and see what comes up.  I don't mean to say that naming is easy -- it's not but why pick a deliberately bad name?

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FontBitch.  How very, very strange.  I seem to have coined a word if not a usage.  I checked my referers yesterday only to find that CodeStore was linking to me.  I never did find the link but they were using the term FontBitch.  So then I googled for it and there are a bunch of uses.  [ Example ] How very, very odd.  Google is shown 195 uses and while I might be the bulk of them, it is coming into wider use.  Hopefully that means that we'll see fewer and fewer fixed size blogs.

Oh and CodeStore has a good review of Phoenix, one of the best implementations yet of Mozilla technology.  I use it daily and love it -- when I'm not in IE the odds are that I'm in Phoenix. [ Go ]  He also had a good pointer to stuff on the IE Rich Edit control.  [ Go ]  Thanks!

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Anyone Got a Goat ?

I don't want to seem like a whiner but my week has continued to get steadily worse.  And going into details won't help so I'm not going to waste anyone's time with it.  Picture a week of the worst Mondays you've ever had all stacked in a row and then their negative intensity squarted.  That's been my week.  So all I can say is this:

Does anyone out there have a goat they are willing to sacrifice to purge this obvious karmic hell I'm stuck in ?

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