There used to be a great little Vim cheatsheet on tuxfiles.org, but that domain no longer exists and is now cybersquatted. While the Internet Archive has a cache, I figured I'd post a copy here for easy reference for myself and maybe it is useful to others too. Read more
Version 4 and later of popular database management tool phpMyAdmin "helpfully" displays warnings when a column name in a database conflicts with a reserved word in MySQL. This may or may not be an actual problem. If you are in the habit of enclosing table names in your SQL queries in `backticks`, it shouldn't be a problem at all. For others, it may depend on the actual column name. In the example provided below, "start" and "end" can safely be SELECTed unquoted, whereas "group" needs the backticks. At any rate, having the warnings show up the whole time rather than just at table creation time is annoying. Here's how to disable them. Read more
With some free time and a spare laptop on my hands, I figured I'd try out running a Linux desktop installation once more. Although I've used Linux on servers for more than a decade, all of my regular desktop machines have been Windows and Mac OS. Now, most people running Linux on the desktop seem to be using Ubuntu. I fully intend to give that a try later on, but for now I went with the distro I've been most familiar with for the past 12 years, which is openSUSE. Although I've been able to set things up to the point where it's viable as a proper workstation for me, I'm sorry to say the experience fluctuated between pleasant and dreadful. Here's some of the stuff I encountered and what I did to get things to a usable state. Read more
After being very tight-lipped about their plans for the next version of Windows, Microsoft have now officially given the first demos of the the next generation of Windows, called "Windows 8" for now. It is a mix of the live tiles from Windows Phone 7's "Metro UI" and the traditional Windows 7 UI. Everybody and their uncle will have an opinion on this. Here's mine. What I've seen leaves me with mixed feelings. As a casual tablet user, I'm loving it. As a deskop PC worker and power user, it fills me with dread. Read more
