What’s so fascinating about these two philosophies and aesthetics is how they contrast so sharply, and yet share so many conceptual similarities. As Koren puts it in his book:

• Both apply to all manner of manmade objects, spaces and designs.
• Both are strong reactions against the dominant, established sensibilities of their time. Modernism was a radical depature from 19th-century classicism and eclecticsism. Wabi-sabi was a radical depature from the Chinese perfection and gorgeousness of the 16th-century and earlier.
• Both eschew any decoration that is not integral to structure.
• Both are abstract, nonrepresentational ideasl of beauty.
• Both have readily identifiable surface characteristics. Modernism is seamless, polished, and smooth. Wabi-sabi is earthy, impefect, and variegated.

Wabi-sabi being summed up as the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Is is a beauty of things modest and humble.

Anyway, lusty-explorer adds quick ways to browse either the loaded buffers, or browse the filesystem, but doing both in a way which blows away the built-in directory browser in Vim. But the way I like to browse files is basicly with a “recently used” file list, which should include currently open files. So with some changes to the lusty-explorer script, it now has a great “recently used” explorer, which I find totally eliminates any need to check currently loaded buffers. Want to open a file you know you’ve opened recently? Just hit <leader>lu, and the last many files you opened are there, easy to get to. If the file is alredy open, Vim just switches to that buffer, just like if you had entered :e file.

Get lusty-explorer-mod.vim.

Remote Desktop, Consolas and ClearType, oh my

Something else which I’ve found a need for, is a capability to detect when Vim is used in a remote desktop session. Since I spend maybe half of all my time working in a RD, where ClearType is usually disabled, that means that my preferred font, Consolas looks like shit. While not the same as having ClearType disabled, I found that the easiest way out was to check if the current session was via Remote Desktop (look for the SM_REMOTESESSION.) Thankfully that’s pretty easy to check. Here’s a minuscule C program which does this.

#include <windows.h>
#pragma comment(lib, "user32.lib")

int main(void) {
    if (GetSystemMetrics(SM_REMOTESESSION)) {
        printf("1");
    } else {
        printf("0");
    }
    return 0;
}

The precompiled file here is compiled for 32bit, on WinXP, but tested on 64bit 2008 Server as well, where it should work just fine, through the miracle of WOW. You can use this small executable, by dropping it in the path of computers where you use Vim, and where you might also log in via Remote Desktop, and then you can tweak your _vimrc like this:

if has("gui_running") " gvim is running
    if has('win32')
        set guifont=Consolas:h11:cANSI
        if system("remotesession") == "1"
            set guifont=Lucida_Console:h10:cANSI
        endif
    endif
endif

Lets you get the best of both worlds, Consolas, when ClearType is (probably) present, and Lucida when not (Lucida Console is still fairly decent.)

How do you handle non-english terms in your code?

I imagine most programmers write their code in english. This simply makes the most sense, I’m sure people will agree with this. The vast majority of pre-existing code (libraries, APIs) is in english. The literature and enviroments that programmers need to work in or with are english. And sometimes even technical issues, such as tool chain inabilities to handle some more complex character sets. While the issue is fairly banal, it does relate to the core issues in programming, semiotics and the encoding of meaning in the written word.

Programming is solving problems in some domain, be it mathematics, the local post office or a ticket seating systems for a stadium, and as such, you deal in the terms found in that domain. But when you’re not dealing with an english domain term, how do you handle that? I’m sure almost every non-english CS student has come across this issue, as universities tend to be a place where the native language is valued highly (and rightly so), and thus even very technical terms have found local translations.

The problems of encoding and translations are not new issues. The image depicts the top of the Rosetta Stone, showing the then lost egyption heiroglyphs encoding.

Indblikskode versus Access code

To keep it from being completely abstract, let’s take on an example. At work, we have a massive EDM system. As part of the security of this system, there’s a term called “indblikskode”. This denotes a code which a user has in the system. The code allows the user to view (and otherwise interact) with documents in the system. So, do we translate this danish term, or do we use it as is?

Indblikskode is an exact term with a specific meaning when coupled with our EDM system, but if I translate it into for example “access code”, which may well mean the same thing, it has lost all the embedded meaning when coupled with our EDM system. If we forego a translation, we risc ending up with pidgin english, such as getIndblikskode();. Having myself, and anyone who may have to handle the code, plays translator isn’t exactly very productive either. And herein lies the issue.

How to properly balance the loss of information as you move away from the terms of the problem domain, versus the problems of mixing languages.

As always the answer is probably “it depends”. Who will look at the code after you’re done with it? How well can translations actually be made? Can only some terms be translated? The issue is that this problem is most oftenly handled by programmers, who sit with their editors, and are naming variables. It’s unrealistic to expect to commitee such work, and most programmers must simply work from a gut feeling.

w3schools “3 lines of documentation” regarding the ASP.NET PlaceHolder class.

I mean, this is a total joke. When did w3schools start out? 2000? They became popular with their concise CSS properties listings back in the day. But seriously, it’s like this site is frozen in time. Their CSS reference point is 2.0 from 1998 (not that a mere properties reference would list much different from 2.0 and 2.1, but there are some minor additions.) I would prefer they would work on updating their CSS reference instead of wasting time on ASP.NET.

There’s enough “interesting link sites” services out there there’s just no need to attempt to present down my perhaps 4-5 daily site checks as somehow unique. They aren’t. I check the old new thing now and then. I read Computerworld.dk to get a view of how the landscape of the danish commercial software scene. I wish I was cool and spent alot of time on Lambda the Ultimate, but I’m not, so I just visit it every few weeks and poke around.

Overall it just seems like we’re building paths to everywhere. But it’s nice to arrive as well. And I guess I wish for this site to be a destination for some people (and maybe helpful as well). Feel free to hit your back button now!

My old site had a very article “centric” look, and I’m not entirely sure I managed to translate that look and feel over to a more snippet oriented 2 column classic blog format. But mostly because this new software just contains so many more pages then my old did. So still lots of stuff to do; I need to get around to looking at making some nice URLs, instead of these horrible ?id=213 URL fragments that floats around. The site probably doesn’t validate. And overall need to check that the site works in all it’s little niches …

Oh, and if you’re looking for the old stuff, the content is in all the usual places, haven’t deleted any content, and until such a time as I get the old front page index and possibly content ported over (still not sure how to handle that), here’s a link to the old index page.

And this makes for my … 8th or so iteration of my site, which has lived on this domain since 2001, and on a few others for a few years before that. And I wish to send my gratitude to my friend Lasse, for providing great hosting ever since my former domain went defunct in late 2002.

But anyway. I’m very happy to finally have a blog and having it gotten launched tonight.