New job

I really like my new job! I’m free to choose technologies and tools to use, I can decide what’s right and what’s wrong on my own. It’s really amazing!

Because of my bosses being abroad, no one stays behind my back and watches what I’m doing. Probably they can do this by means of remote desktop, but do they need to?

The only awful thing is inevitable: I want to sleep, just fall down asleep and don’t wake up only until I feel strong and fresh enough again.

The French

Because of the orthodontic treatment, I can’t pronounce [ts], it sounds very ugly from me. What I’ve just thought of is it’d be very suitable and comfortable for me to speak French, because they don’t use that sound at all.

New job

New job, new problems, but the world never changes: the existing code is awful, but it works!

Let’s make the language cleaner!

Only clever head allows itself to carry a modest hair-cut. One should diverge by his intelligence!

I’ve just added ability to send me feedbacks about typos or other orthographical errors. Just select erroneous text with mouse pointer and press Ctrl+Enter. Thank you in advance!

Using DocBook XML from now

I always disliked HTML because of its oddities. To post previous table I tried three times to mark it up. Then I gave up, and switched to the thing I really know, that’s DocBook XML.

First, the posts have very clean logic structure, there’s no mixture of content and representation.

Second, all sources of my posts can be stored in my repository now. That has promising advantages for the future.

My next goal is to find an offline blogger client, probably a plugin for the vim, so that I could avoid using html forms and automate the process of posting.

Typing text is getting easier

It was always complicated to type some beautiful text characters, for instance quotation marks ‘’ or “”. Actually, I’ve never known how to do it efficiently enough. When I worked under windows, I pressed the alt key then typed four-digit code of the character, and finally released the alt. That was six–seven keys to press!

There was no such possibility under Linux at all. So I tried to use the OpenOffice.org writer first. After years of software development I decided that there’s no better editor than the Vim. So I started using it everywhere. To edit a text in a web input field, I use the ViewSourceWith add-on for Mozilla. To type an exotic sign ’, I pressed <c-v>u2019. That was another seven keys.

And finally I discovered so called digraphs. This beast can help to type almost any character by pressing only four keys. For example, the same apostroph ’ can be typed as <c-k>'9. Moreover, two-character abbreviation of a sign is very easy to remember:

'6, '9	‘, ’	Digits 6 and 9 are very like the sign itself.
"6, "9	“, ”w	The same story as above.
-N, -M	–, —	En and em dashes respectively.
N0	№	Numero, number.

I haven’t found the ellipsis …, so I had to define it manually in my .vimrc: :digraph 3_ 8230.

Guests

We often say that an uninvited guest is worse than a tatar. But my yesterday’s occasion was just opposite. They had had come and fallen asleep by the time I returned home in the evening, and they had had disappeared by the time I woke up in the next morning. May it have just seemed to me?