Recently I found myself doing a large amount of tedious coding. This came out from the specification analysis I had been doing. Large amounts of data elements mapped to IDs, and different column names in different databases. Somehow I had to make the code work. Instead of just jumping in and writing all of the code I decided to think about a smart way to do it first (which is always a good idea). I must say I love VIM. Many others can not stand it, it's so old school. There are all these nice graphical tools available. Bah I say. I had a column of 60 odd variable names, which also needed to be used as associative array indexes, and in many other spots to reference form objects and on and on. I just created a text file listing the names which made it simple to wholesale insert them in VIM
:r <filename>
But who do you make use of the columns now? I also love VIM because of recordable macros. Record the steps you go through, and you can access those steps easily by typing
@ <macroname>
So I prefixed, and suffixed the list of names with the same calls. Then to run through a process like ... go to the first dollar sign in the line ($), take the entire text between the dollar sign and the comma, move to the empty quotes (''), paste the text you copied in between them, and make it all lower case. the move to the next line, and the next dollar sign. I simply hit "q" to start recording, and gave it a name. Did my process and ran that macro until my code was complete. lets see dream weaver pull that one off. ;-)
I found myself in the office doing some remote work for a client. Let's jsut say I was bailing them out again. they have had some other people looking after things, and I must say it was not pretty. I found all sorts of things that were simply broken. I couldn't even do what they asked until I first fixed the broken features. I consider myself a nice guy, so I was going to do a couple of things gratis. When I realized I would have to fix things back to my original code, there was no way I could let that go for free. That's a bad move to make. It all worked out, and I ended up making all of the changes live on the production server. The second group of programmers decided to remove the original product from version control, so I had no other choice when I was no where near my usual set up. It's Sunday evening, so I wasn't worried at all.
It was also my birthday on Friday. The big 27. People bought lots of ice cream cake. Twice in one day. Karen Kneier also got me a fancy cigarette package. Way cool! We went out Friday to the Knockanback, then to the Lucy bar, and Hush. There were lots of interesting people out in
Maybe next year.
