So on saturday I went to the volcanic eruption which is currently going on in Iceland. 3 co-workers of mine and me rented some helicopter trip which went from Skógafoss up to Fimmvörduháls where the eruption is happening. There is only one word to describe this experience: AWESOME. We took quite some fotos and some video footage, which I’ll try to compile here as soon as possible. Here you can see some of the pictures Alex took, for a start.
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So we had Þorrablót yesterday. For those of you which do not know what this is, it’s the traditional icelandic midwinter feast where a lot of original viking dishes are being served. And those dishes are really tough. For a start, there’s sheep head (Svið) and sheep testicles (Hrútspungur). These do actually taste a lot better than one might expect… as long as the strong smell of the putrefied shark (Hákarl) has not taken away all your senses by then (my clothes still smell from it, after having them out on the balcony for about 12 hours now). Just make sure that you have a decent supply of Brennivin with you. Your stomach will long for it after you had those dishes; and it brings you into the right mood for dancing through the remaining night, which is definitely the more enjoyable part of the celebration. If there’s one thing that constantly surprises me over here in Iceland, then it is the amount of high-tech applied in every day life. No, I do not mean that basically every delivery service and postman is equipped with some mobile credit card reading device. Even the use of facial recognition as access control mechanism to the local gyms is something that I could understand – after all, it is a small country and every high profile person is probably going to that gym, too , and leave alone the amount of times someone forgets his or her membership card to get access. However, what really amazed me was when I was waiting at the university bus stop. It starts with some animated advertisement inside the lodge. OK, nothing special. However, that animated advertisement also has a heating device which is heating the lodge. And no, the lodge cannot be closed, so it is basically heating 24-7. To top it off that lodge also has a wifi access point. Man, I really like this country. Always good for a surprise, and totally nerdy. I don’t want to start the usual flame war between vi and emacs. The choice for me to start learning vi (or more precisely gvim) was simply made because a few of my colleagues are using it, and there is a really good cheat sheet available for it. So why do I want to master Vim Fu? Well, due to my job at CCP I started to code a lot of Python and there really isn’t any decent environment available for it. Sure, there is Eclipse with Pydev – which is a neat combination – but eclipse always comes with all this bloat and is really, really slow. Instead I used Notepad++ so far which is a quite neat notepad replacement on windows, however it suffers from a constant loss of its “langs.xml” which is required for syntax highlighting. The main issue with all IDEs and editors that bugged me, though, was the inability of properly using them on a laptop. I don’t know why laptop manufacturers think that it would be neat to arrange the ins/del/end/pos/pgup/pgdn keys differently on every laptop, but it really freaks me out and makes me break my fingers when I try to program there. Vi instead does not require me to use these “navigation keys”, and allows even more powerful things than just navigating through the file itself. If I want to delete a line I just type “dd” nowadays, instead of “pos1, shift+end, del”. And if I want to repeat that I just have to press “.” (yes, just a simple period). That is neat. What first appears to be a downside is that one has to get used to some concepts that are slightly different from other editors. It starts with vim’s idea of spending as few time as possible in the so called “insert mode” in which vim acts like – excuse me for saying it so harshly – any other stupid text editor. Most of the time you want to spend in its normal mode (which you can enter by simply hitting “ESC”) . Then it continues to the concept of “buffers” which actually turned out to be nothing else but different documents – with the added bonus of, f.e., using the same buffer in several windows and several buffers in the same window. So ultimately those things are not disadvantages, just slightly different approaches to the way editors usually handle these things. Lastly, vim comes with huge repositories for tips and scripts. My personal favourites, so far, are the pydiction plugin and EasyGrep. But then again I just started using vim, and I am sure there are plenty more additions that I will start welcoming over time. Some of you might have noticed that my page was showing some fancy error page for a while. It was one of those really classic and completely unnecessary mistakes when deleting files in a Unix command shell while being logged in as root user. Oh well. At least it reminded me upon canceling the contract for my virtual private server and go for a good old standard web-hosting package instead. All the manual updating of services kept on being more annoying than benefiting, especially since my interest in programming web applications is gone since two years or so. So now here I am, configuring this WordPress instance, waiting for my domain to be transferred to 1&1 and mocking up first content. In the future you will not just be able to expect a simple blog about my life in Iceland (and the country in general) but even more so a series of articles about software development as well as tips, tricks and answers to general programming question. On to a nice future with the next revision of my website. |
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