Random Brain Dump

I stumbled across this little nifty debugging feature in Eclipse this morning. Turns out that you can write a little code snippet as part of formatters for different classes.

This is very useful because you can get custom display an object in debug mode without touching the original code override the toString() method in the class.

Code Assist also works in the little code snippet editor, of course…

Sweet!

This little graph is showing the decay of IE once overwhelming dominance in the browser market:

I’ve added a Twitter widget on the sidebar. So now my tweets are published on Random Brain Dump as well. Next up, is to integrate a Facebook plugin.

I recently discovered this nifty mode called “wdired” (writable dired). It gives “dired”, the simple directory management tool within Emacs, some editing functionalities.

In short you can “edit” contents in a directory. With it, you “edit” a directory like a file buffer. So instead of making changes one file at a time, this mode lets you leverage Emacs editing commands and batch up your changes in a buffer and then apply all of them when at one shot when you “save” the buffer.

This saves me a couple of minutes when I had to do some mass file manipulation last week. I was able to use query-string to selectively move large number of files and fix broken symbolic links.

Sweet…

Emacs has a little package called SaveSpace that makes Emacs remember the position of the cursor for each file you opened. It’s nice to open a file and the cursor automatically jumps to where it was last. Sweet!

To enable SaveSpace, add the following configurations in your ~/.emacs file

(setq save-place-file “~/.emacs.d/saveplace”)
(setq-default save-place t)
(require ‘saveplace)

I can’t help but notice the steady stream of high level exodus @ Yahoo! It’s not surprising with a change of command, but the flight seems extra-ordinary to me and I find it disturbing for Yahoo! Below are some of news stream I’ve encountered:

• ChoiceStream scores
• AOL scores
• PR head resigns
• Sales chief is dugged
• Zimbra founder leaves
• Decker leaves

A few cool Mac downloads I’ve come across this week…

This RDC client enables you to remotely connect to a Windows computer and control its desktop, from your Mac. Awesome!

Wallsaver is a widget that enables screensavers as background. I like how quickly you can switch it on/off to go between screensaver and wallpapers. Unbelievably cool to have the Matrix screensaver running on the background. I do feel like I’m Neo… 🙂

Ran across an iPhone port of Crayon Physics… I was blown away by the simple but ultra-cool 2D physics puzzle game. The simple goal is to guide a ball to hit a target star by drawing 2D objects that interact with it. Worth every penny of its cost of 99 cents (the deluxe version costs $4.99), check it out here…

One of the things I love about Emacs is its extensibility. It has all sorts of different edit modes for different file types. For example, SGML mode comes standard for editing XML & HTML. It’s a step up from normal text edit mode, it renders tags in color fonts. But it’s pretty plain vanilla editing– no syntax validation nor smart tag completion.

I started to use nxml-mode earlier this week and am liking it. Here’re some of the nice features:

• Smarter rendering of tags
• Real-time syntax checking
• Tag completion
• Support of folding
• Link handling

You can download nxml-mode here. The latest file as of this writing is “nxml-mode-20041004.tar.gz”. Unzip the package into the standard emacs “site-lisp” directory (it’s /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp on my macbook).

Configure it to auto-load and bind to various file extension via the following configuration in your .emacs file:

(load “rng-auto.el”)
(add-to-list ‘auto-mode-alist
              (cons (concat “\\.” (regexp-opt ‘(“xml” “xsd” “sch” “rng” “xslt” “svg” “rss”) t) “\\'”)
                    ‘nxml-mode))
(setq magic-mode-alist
      (cons ‘(“<???xml ” . nxml-mode)
            magic-mode-alist))
(fset ‘xml-mode ‘nxml-mode)
(fset ‘html-mode ‘nxml-mode)

I saw a good deal for a 4GB USB/thumb drive on one of the deal sites I frequent this week. It’s pretty bare bone but it meets my 2 requirements: a retractable USB head and a small form factor to be attached to a key chain.

I then secured it by encrypting its content using TrueCrypt, an open-source encryption software. Encrypting/decrypting files has always been a pain, but TrueCrypt makes it easy. You basically read and write the files seamlessly as a password-protected mounted drive. Encrypting and decrypting are done on the fly automatically. Piece of cake…

The best part is that since TrueCrypt is available in Windows, Mac and Linux, my personal data on the new USB drive is now both secure and truly portable across platforms.

Sweet! 🙂