Being able to use plain alphabeitc keys as editing commands is for many of us a great strength of the vi editor. It allows us to edit without hunting for the placement of the various movement keys on each particular keyboard, and, most of the time, without having to juggle in order to combine particular keys with ctrl or alt. However, this advantage can turn into a curse when editing files using a non-ASCII keyboard layout. When the keyboard input method is switched to another script (Greek in my case, or, say, Cyrillic for others) vi will stop responding to its normal commands, because it will encounter unknown characters. Here is how I've dealt with this problem.

Continue reading "Sane vim Editing of Unicode Files"

Four years ago I wrote about a method that could be used to have the Unix Bourne shell interpret Windows batch files. I'm using this trick a lot, because programming using the Windows/DOS batch files facilities is decidedly painful, whereas the Bourne shell remains a classy programming environment. There are still many cases where the style of Unix shell programming outshines and outperforms even modern scripting languages.

Continue reading "Batch Files as Shell Scripts Revisited"

Technical prose is almost immortal.

— Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Continue reading "Code Documentation"

Last modified: Sunday, July 11, 2010 1:32 pm

The ISI Web of Knowledge recently published the 2009 Journal Citation Reports. Following similar studies I performed in 2007, 2008, and 2009, here is my analysis of the current status and trends for the impact factor in computer science journals.

Continue reading "Impact Factor of Computer Science Journals 2009"

During the past six months I've been drowning in email. I spend a large part of my day responding to email messages and filing incoming messages I consider important. Yet I'm falling behind and this affects the quality of my work: I sometimes delay responding to important messages. Followng Peter Drucker's dictum "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it", I decided to write a tool to analyze my incoming and outgoing email messages.

Continue reading "Email Analytics"

Earlier today I had the privilege to attend a lecture on crisis management by the Harvard Senior Lecturer Ron Heifetz. Here is a list of points that struck me (in the form of slightly edited tweets), and my view of their relevance to software development.

Continue reading "Ron Heifetz on Crisis Leadership"

I drown in email and my aspirations for handling it are becoming increasingly lame. In the 1980s my goal used to be an empty mailbox at the end of each session. During the 1990s the goal became to empty the mailbox by the end of the day. But tasks I couldn't complete within the day accumulated, so in the 2000s I just tried to have only so many messages as could fit in a window without a scrollbar, so that I could immediately scan what I had to do. Nowadays my modest goal is to keep the size of my mailbox below 100 messages, and I succeed in that only half of the time.

Continue reading "Email's Ten by Ten Law"

A generous car reviewer might praise a vehicle’s handling by writing that it turns as if it’s running on railroad tracks. Indeed, tracks offer guidance and support. When you run on tracks you can carry more weight, you can run faster, and you can’t get lost. That’s why engineers, from early childhood to old age, get hooked on trains. Can we get our software to run on tracks?

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Four years ago I blogged about an incantation that would allow the Windows command interpreter (cmd) to execute Unix shell scripts written inside plain batch files. Time for an update.

Continue reading "Useful Polyglot Code"