byronc bits

I don't know why I put off trying it for so long, but Vimperator is incredibly cool. Now I really can drive almost everything I use with the keyboard, and with Vi-like keybindings to boot.

It seems to me that sales tax in Utah used to be 6.25%. Then an extra 1% was added to prepared food. Then other small chunks were added in. If you've ever wanted to see the sales tax breakdown for where you live, there's a helpful chart on the Utah state website.

If you've been running Windows in VirtualBox OSE you've probably noticed that it doesn't include a prebuilt copy of the guest additions. I've been working on a project so that you won't have to setup a build environment on a Windows box and then install the drivers by hand on your virtual machine. So, here it is, a VirtualBox OSE Windows Guest Additions Installer. It should work on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista, but has only been tested on XP.

At the BYU UUG meeting this week, Peter mentioned a great ViM trick that I've never seen before. Here's my feeble attempt to document it.

Because ViM macros are stored in registers they can be edited. This means that if you create a long macro and then realize that you forgot to send the cursor to the beginning of the line before finishing the recording, you don't have to create the entire macro again, you can just add the motion command. You use it like this:

1. Start recording your macro by typing q and then the single character ([0-9a-zA-Z"] are allowed). The single character is the register your macro will be stored in.
2. Enter the commands you want included in the macro.
3. Type q to finish recording the macro.
4. At this point you could run the macro by using @ and the register name.
5. To modify the macro, move to a blank line and type "Rp replacing R with the register name of your macro. This will paste all the commands in your macro to the current line.
6. After making the changes you need, save the macro by typing 0"Ry$ replacing R with the register name you want to use for the macro. The register name does not have to be the same as the original.

I've heard rumblings about Urwid occasionally; today I actually had a chance to use it. For those who haven't seen it before, Urwid is a pure Python library for console user interfaces. It can uses curses as the backend or speak directly to the terminal emulator. The library isn't too complex and as long as you can pick colors better than I can the TUIs look pretty nice. Check it out the next time you don't want to write a GUI.