Wednesday, February 11, 2009

more ffox plugins

These are more for the UI folk:

Colorzilla:Look up a pixel's color value

Unicode lookup/converter : Character lookup utility

MeasureIt : Ruler widget for measuring distance in pixels

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Vim links

People either love vi or hate it; if you hate it, sod off and take your parentheses with you.

It's good to have a printout of the vi reference card handy, and a cheat sheet or two saved locally:

Vi Reference Card (PDF)
Graphical Vim Cheat Sheet (GIF)
Vim Cheat Sheet

In support of the "learn a new vim command every day" effort, both Vim Tips and the Vim Cookbook have proved interesting, as has the piping feature.
Speaking of pipes, pv is quite an interesting utility. So is histring, but it doesn't seem to be available (or maintained) except in rpm.

Vim has a ton of plugins worth checking out, including:
FuzzyFinder
OmniComplete
TagList
RenameWithCScope
C Call Tree Explorer
SourceCodeObedience
VimDebug
MiniBufferExplorer
SnippetsEmu
AllFold
Fly
SessionManager
Alternate
RunView
Scratch*
VcsCommand
MultVals
GitCommit
GitDiff
GitFile
Git Branch Info
There is also NERDTree, but its moderate utility does not justify its horrible name.

Most languages have syntax and snippet plugins, such as:
C
Python
Ruby/Rails
Perl
SQL
x86 and x86-64 asm
XML/HTML


Finally, to forestall the inevitable requests, here is a sample .vimrc .

DNS

DNS timeouts have been pretty bad lately; decided to take action and make resolve.conf actually be usable. Of course, it gets overwritten every time DHCP is used to configure an interface, so the name servers have to be added to dhclient.conf .

There are quite a lot of reliable servers to choose from:

OpenDNS
TechFAQ public dns server list
dnsserverlist.org
dnsserverlist.org organized by round trip time

The last two are particularly useful: dnsserverlist.org recommends three DNS servers based on your current IP, and provides an option for sorting their list by round-trip-time.

"Permanent" DNS servers can be added by editing /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and adding 'prepend domain-name-servers' lines:

prepend domain-name-servers 216.224.112.14;
prepend domain-name-servers 67.198.198.213;
prepend domain-name-servers 69.111.95.106 ;
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222;
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.220.220;
prepend domain-name-servers 4.2.2.1;
prepend domain-name-servers 4.2.2.2;
prepend domain-name-servers 151.197.0.38;
prepend domain-name-servers 151.202.0.84;
prepend domain-name-servers 151.203.0.84;

Remember to list these in reverse-order: the last server prepended will be the first line in resolv.conf.

The ultimate solution, of course, is to set up a local caching DNS server.