Zap Gremlins

When copying text into Vim from Microsoft applications, such as Outlook or Word, every line ending will often have a ^M character appended. These pesky characters are known as gremlins. They are annoying and mess up my otherwise beautiful text. What to do? Destroy them with a single command, of course.

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Equifax Hack - What to Do?

Embattled credit reporting agency Equifax, through a security flaw in its website, has exposed virtually the entire population of US credit-holders (approximately 143 million people) to identity fraud. As far as I can tell, the only thing we can do to protect ourselves is to put a freeze on our credit with each of five credit reporting agencies (including the scum of the earth, Equifax). This will prevent anyone (including ourselves) from doing credit checks or opening new lines of credit in our names.

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My employer was acquired this week. There has been a measure of reveling and celebrating at the office; morale is very high.

It feels good to be part of an organization that is dominating in its vertical market. I’ve certainly seen the opposite situation first-hand, whether it was due to market forces or a less-than-stellar acquisition.

Without the wounds those experiences left me with, I wouldn’t be able to savor this moment nearly as much. It’s not often that this happens. A handful times in a career, I’d guess.

Vim Cheat Sheet for Programmers: Dvorak Edition

I found this intense Vim cheat sheet, and noticed that the author, Michael, had made the Excel 2011 sources available. Furthermore, he was kind enough to give it a Copyleft license. Being a user of the Dvorak keyboard layout, I took a few moments tonight to adapt the 300dpi color version to Dvorak. I’m making them available to download them for free, just like the originals. Other than the key layout changes, I bumped the version from 2.

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Three Things I've Learned With Haskell

This is the first of a series of posts. We’ll see how it goes if I try to keep each one limited to “three things.” That seems a nice, manageable number. While picking my way through Haskell Programming from First Principles, I’ve come across a number of interesting syntactic concepts that I haven’t seen much of (or at all) in my prior programming experience until recently. Note: I’ve been a front-end developer primarily focused on JavaScript and other dynamic languages for most of my professional life, while these things are new to me, I’m fully aware that they may not be new for you.

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Putting Aside the Ranger

Put aside the ranger. Become who you were born to be. —Elrond Half-elven Nothing about my life, or this little story, is anywhere near as inspirational as when Elrond gives Anduril, forged from the shards of Narsil, to Aragorn. In fact, there’s ample opportunity yet for crushing disappointment to steal the day. It’s my hope that writing this here, now, will put just enough pressure on myself to stick with what I’ve committed to do.

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The Intervening Years

Is this thing on? “Hiatus” isn’t really the best descriptor I didn’t officially take a hiatus from my own blog, since it was never much of a blog in the first place. Regardless, with no apologies or excuses, I’m going to perform a brief rewind and fast-forward to catch us up to the present. 2013 Led several responsive web front-end prototype projects. Built a SPA to run in a custom Webkit browser on resource-starved embedded systems.

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