Has anyone seen my spork?

I spend much of my day inside various text editors hacking away at the various projects that work demands of me. A good editor can make the difference between getting the job done quickly and languishing in a copy-paste-edit-repeat nightmare.

I’d like to offer you a list of editors that I use with a small comment about each one. I’ll follow up with some brief product reviews pointing out what I like and don’t like about each one.

Here’s the list:

• BBEdit – The grandaddy of Mac editors.
• TextWrangler – The grandson of BBEdit. Lags behind in features but makes up for it in price: free
• TextMate – an editor with amazingly powerful tricks up it’s sleeve.
• Coda – all in one web-site oriented editor. My PHP-coding coworkers love this program.
• Espresso – a new editor. Part of the MacHeist bundle. I have not tried it yet, but it looks promising. From the same folks who do CSSEdit. Web-site oriented like Coda.
• Affrus – a Perl-oriented editor that includes a GUI interface to Perl’s deubgger. If you do any work in perl, Affrus is a must. It’s saved me countless hours by letting me debug down into the Perl libraries to find errors that don’t get reported up correctly.
• CSSEdit – a CSS editor. Listen, someday you will ahve to break down and create/edit a CSS file. CSSEdit makes that experience much less painful.

Reviews to follow.

Apache Directory Studio

This is a nice piece of software. If you do any LDAP work it’s worth the time to download and try out. I don’t have to boot windows to use LDAPBrowser anymore!

I have had a busy week. As soon as I have assimilated it all, I will write about it.

Here’s a question posted to a mailing list that I follow:

I just want to go through the xml and return the names of all the elements as well as the names of their attributes. It seems that most of the time, people know the name of the tag they’re looking for, and they want to get the inner html or the value of one of its attributes.

Is there a method in Hpricot or REXML that enables you to just get a list of all the tag names and attributes?

Here’s my solution:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'

doc = Hpricot(open("x.xml"))

elements = Array.new
attributes = Array.new

doc.search("//*").each do |e|
       if e.class == Hpricot::Elem
               elements << e.name
               e.attributes.each do |a|
                       attributes << a[0]
               end
       end
end

puts "Elements:"
puts elements.join("\n")

puts

puts "Attributes:"
puts attributes.join("\n")

It's ugly, but it gives you an array of elements and attributes. You could run sort and unique on the arrays if you wanted to get a stripped down list.

Here’s an interesting article about the commingling of content on Web 2.0 sites and how that impacts activism and censorship:

The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech

I don’t know if I’ve posted this here before, but it’s worth posting again. Here’s the most impressive flash animation I’ve ever seen:

Low Morale’s Creep.

Seems someone missed 500,000 square kilometers of polar ice because of “sensor drift.”

Here’s the cold, hard truth.

I think I’m going to use “sensor drift” as an excuse from now on.

Behold:

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the laptop with all of the stickers on it is a Mac.

[Update] It gets better: David Lee Roth vs. Songsmith. Wow.

I love physics.