Not sure how I feel about the loss of the optical drives… On the one hand I think its a good thing in the long run, not many people use the drive for loading software and everyone (read: Netflix) seems to be pushing for streaming content to machines as opposed to physical media. On the other hand, I have a Mac Mini serving as my media center in our living room and we use the heck out the optical drive to watch DVD movies, both from our own library of DVD’s and places like Redbox (along with online media such as Hulu and Netflix)

Of course now that the optical drive has been removed, we now have the opportunity to put whatever type of external drive on the Mini that we want. Now if we could just get an inexpensive Blueray player and Blueray playback on the Mini, we’d be good to go!

Emacs

Text editors are varied and many-flavored.  In the unix world, there are two primary editors: Vim and Emacs.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses.  (please, no need to get all huffy about it, I use both.  It’s true and I admit it: I am ambi-textrous)   For the quick editing of small scripts, notes, or log files I tend to favor the use of Vim.   I have a handful of basic Vim commands that I use constantly to edit and save files; a few commands such as search and replace functions that get used occasionally; and then there is a whole world of commands that I am completely unfamiliar with.  Vim Viewports is one such category of commands.

Did you know that the text editor Vim (which stands for Visual editor IMproved) is capable of providing a windowed editing page?   In Vim-land, these windows are called ‘viewports’   When you first invoke Vim from the unix command line you start out with a single viewport.

Vim - Single viewport

This is the default view that most users of Vim are used to seeing.   I’ve been using Vim (or it’s predecessor Vi) for well over a decade now and this single-viewport view is the only one I’ve used until very recently.   There are times when I want to be able to edit one file, while referencing another.  Before utilizing viewports, that meant opening another terminal, setting up another connection, and displaying the reference file using cat, less or more (depending on the system)

That all changed when I re-discovered the fact that Vim supports multiple viewports!  From the command mode of Vim (there are two modes; command mode and edit mode.  If you are unfamiliar with these concepts then this article is most likely not for you. Go learn some Vim basics over at the Vim homepage: http://www.vim.org/ then please come back!)

::ahem:: Where were we?

Vim - Three Viewports

Ah yes, from the command mode of Vim enter :split to split the current viewport horizontally.  Entering :vsp will split the window vertically.  Different text can then be loaded into each viewport using :e <filename>  Moving from one viewport to the next is accomplished using Ctrl-w Ctrl-w.  (that’s Ctrl-w twice, not a typo)   Or the standard Vim cursor movement keys modified with a Ctrl-w will also move you between viewports.  So Ctrl-w j will move you one viewport down, Ctrl-w k will move you one viewport up, and so on.  (for h j k l )

The content of each viewport can be swapped back and forth or rotated by using Ctrl-w r to move the current viewport contents to the right or Ctrl-w R to move the contents to the left.

It’s easy to open a bunch of viewports and have them all different sizes, making the contents difficult to read.  Issuing Ctrl-w = will resize all of the viewports, making them equal sizes (or as close as possible)

Some Vim commands for manipulating viewports

:sp|:split will split the Vim window horizontally.

:vsp|:vsplit will split the Vim window vertically.

Ctrl-w Ctrl-w moves between Vim viewports.

Ctrl-w j moves one viewport down.

Ctrl-w k moves one viewport up.

Ctrl-w h moves one viewport to the left.

Ctrl-w l moves one viewport to the right.

Ctrl-w = tells Vim to resize viewports to be of equal size.

Ctrl-w – reduce active viewport by one line.

Ctrl-w + increase active viewport by one line.

Ctrl-w q will close the active window.

Ctrl-w r will rotate windows to the right.

Ctrl-w R will rotate windows to the left.

Do you have a great Vim tip?  Or an <editor of your choice> tip?  Then be sure to comment below, I’d love to learn something new!

I haven’t tried the Windows client so I can’t vouch for it, but so far the Mac client has worked with no problems.

::Full Disclosure::

And if you decide to try it out I’d appreciate it if you used my link here.  It’s a referral program and I get an extra 256MB of space for each person that signs up through the link.   For a short time, their bumping that up to 512MB per sign up, so I thought I’d plug the product here and maybe earn myself a bit of extra backup storage!

Did you know that PHP could interface with a MySQL database? Well it can, and here’s how! The code below illustrates just how easy it is to produce a nice table with headers populated with data culled from a database. One little trick I like to use (and have used for a very long time) when displaying table data is to alternate the background color. This makes it a bit easier to read the data (at least it does for me) Notice that when the table is initialized (<table><tr bgcolor=\”#afafaf\”>), I define the background color. Later as the code iterates through the lines of data, I test to see what the current backgound color is, and then reverse it. Not rocket science, but it spruces things up just a bit. I have been using a heavily modified version of this code in several places, whether it is for displaying log files or pulling intrusion reports from a Snort database and it has worked quite well. Any comments or improvements are always welcome!

<?php
$link = mysql_connect("database_host", "user", "password");

mysql_select_db("database_name", $link);

$qry = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table_name", $link);
echo <table><tr bgcolor=\"#afafaf\">;
if (mysql_num_rows($qry) > 0) {

for ($i = 0; $i<mysql_num_fields($qry); $i++) {

echo "<td><b>" . mysql_field_name($qry, $i) . "</b></td>";

}

}else{

echo "<td>No entries found in the database</td>";

}
echo "</tr>\n";
if (mysql_num_rows($qry) > 0) {

for ($j = 0; $j<mysql_num_rows($qry); $j++) {

if ($bgcolor == "#ffffff"){

$bgcolor="#cccccc";

}else{

$bgcolor="#ffffff";

}

echo "<tr bgcolor=\"$bgcolor\">";

for ($k = 0; $k<mysql_num_fields($qry); $k++) {

echo "<td>" . mysql_result($qry,$j, $k) . "</td>";

}

echo "</tr>\n";

}

echo "</table>";

}
?>

Looks like Google may be having some issues w/their IMAP services.  I noticed earlier that my palm pilot couldn’t access my gmail account via IMAP, producing a connection error.  When I log into my gmail settings, the IMAP section from the ‘Forwarding and Pop’ tab is now missing:

From a few conversations with a collegue I learned that I could very easily tailor the build process to my specific environment by customizing the make.conf file for emerge.  Unlike some package management systems that either grab a generic binary for your platform, emerge will pull down the latest source code and compile it directly for your specific machine.  If I recall correctly, the FreeBSD ports collection also works this way, as does Debian’s apt (although I’m not sure of the ability to modify machine-specific compile time flags with either system)

The install detailed in the walkthrough (see link above) is a bit sparse on background information such as why call emerge with the oneshot option. (still not sure about that myself, from the emerge man page: “Emerge as normal, but do not add the packages to the world profile for later updating”)  Each of the build steps took a rather long time on the aging Mac G4 box and I unfortunately kept running into compile errors about 3/4ths of the way through the process.  The process failed trying to compile Autom4te (an M4 replacement for autoconf) due to various reasons (one of which might be a missing perl library)

After stepping through the various stages of the install a couple of times and only getting marginal success, I decided the easiest route would be to script the install process so that I could re-run it at my leisure.  I just grabbed the commands listed in the walkthrough and stuck them in a shell script (no error-checking or anything fancy) which would allow me to set a couple of variables and then re-run the script as often as needed.   The script (and the author’s walkthrough) relies on another script called ‘bootstrap-prefix.sh’ (also available from the walkthrough site) so I created a directory called ‘emerge’ and therein placed both the ‘bootstrap-prefix.sh’ script and my own ‘setup_gentoo_bootstrap_env.sh’ script.

I set my ‘EPREFIX’ variable to /usr/local/gentoo, so everytime the process would fail, I could just ‘rm -rf /usr/local/gentoo’ and start over.   Since part of the process includes pulling down all the latest sources I figured that if I just waited a week, maybe someone would have found the issue and fixed it.  But alas, as of this morning the process still fails in the same spot.  So I’ll send a note to the maintainer and see what happens.  Until that time I have to conclude that emerge on OSX constitutes the ‘epic-fail’ tag.

After all of this, I finally just grabbed the latest macports and within minutes I installed several standard software packages.  Both macports and fink provide very easy access for OSX to most readily available linux software.  However it does appear at the moment that macports has been getting more attention and is more supported (at least by comparing the verbage on each of their websites) and even though I’ve been a big fan of fink in the past, I went with macports if for no better reason other than its the one that I haven’t utilized before.

Code for setup_gentoo_bootstrap_env.sh located after the cut.

#!/bin/sh

export EPREFIX=/usr/local/gentoo
export PATH=”$EPREFIX/usr/bin:$EPREFIX/bin:$EPREFIX/tmp/usr/bin:$EPREFIX/tmp/bin:$PATH”

./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX tree
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp wget
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp tar
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp sed
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp python
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp gawk
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp findutils
./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX portage

export LDFLAGS=”-Wl,-search_paths_first -L${EPREFIX}/usr/lib -L${EPREFIX}/lib”
export CPPFLAGS=”-I${EPREFIX}/usr/include”

hash -r

emerge –oneshot sed
emerge –oneshot “<bash-3.2_p33″
emerge –oneshot –nodeps wget

emerge –oneshot coreutils
emerge –oneshot findutils
emerge –oneshot tar
emerge –oneshot grep
emerge –oneshot gawk

env FEATURES=”-collision-protect” emerge –oneshot portage

emerge –oneshot baselayout-prefix