More about Steve Jobs...

A lot has been written about Steve Jobs many of which were simply to idealistic. I just found this article that, it seems to me, better explains Jobs' character, virtues, but also deficiencies. This article actually cites a lot from Steve Jobs' biography written by Isaacson.

Anyway, the truth is that Jobs, no matter what we think about him, did achieve something special and interesting thing is to analyze what virtue that was that made this possible. This article references the work of the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr who argue that industrial revolution started in Britain not because of innovation but because of a tweakers that succeeded in making something already invented much better.  Now, what is claimed by the article is that Jobs was tweaker, not inventor, as exemplified by his own words: You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know (what's right) it when I see it.

Anyway, this is a recommended read.

Using multiple instances of Firefox...

Firefox has a great feature called Profiles. You can use them to have multiple instances of a browser. If you wonder why would you use something like that, here are few reasons:

• you might want to separate professional from private browsing, or to have development or hacking environment distinctive from "usual" environment.
• you might want to try out some new plugin without messing up your existing profiles.
• you have large number of installed plugins that considerably slow down the browser, or can even make it unresponsive, so you want to group them in different instances.

When you start the browser by running firefox command, either from command line or from GUI launcher, it will find existing running instance of browser and activate it. So, in order to be able to run new instance you have to use command line option --no-remote. Also, to select other than default profile, use -P option. In case you don't give an argument to this option the firefox will start with profile selection dialog. In this dialog you'll be able to select profile that should be run, but you can also create new profiles and delete existing ones.

For the end, I mentioned in the introduction that in different profiles I use different plugins. But NoScript plugin I use in every instance as I regard it one of the most important security additions to the browser. I strongly recommend that you install this plugin too!

20 years of vim

Wow, I just stumbled on this article on Ars technica (via Hacker News). This article celebrates 20 years of Vim, an vi clone. I have to say I exclusively use vi (Vim actually, but in compatibility mode) for all my editing, or almost all, this post wasn't written in vi. ;)

The first time I used vi was in 1990, or something like that, but it was only for a short period of time when I had an opportunity to work on an Unix system. If I remember correctly it was produced by ICL and it was based on Intel 80386 running on 16MHz.

It's my personal opinion that if you regard yourself an advanced computer user that you either have to learn how to use vi or Emacs (or XEmacs). After all, if you remotely connect to a server, there will be vi, but very probably no gedit, eclipse, or something like that. I strongly believe that in vi I can work more efficiently then in any modern GUI editor. While we are at vi and Emacs, there used to be many flame wars between proponents of vi and those of Emacs. Anyway, I think they are both very good and capable editors. The main Achilles' heel of Emacs was memory consumption, but according to today's measures these are now relatively modest comparing it to some other tools and applications.

Several things I find very interesting in the article about the Vim. The first is a short history of vi editor, among other facts mentioned is that it was written by Bill Joy. Also interesting is the reason why letters hjkl were chosen for moving cursor. Apparently, the terminal used for vi development had arrows on those keys so they were chosen for that reason. But, they proved to be practical and thus were retained until today. Apart from Vim, there were other vi clones of which nvi that ships with BSD operating systems, along with Vim, are the only ones that survived until today. I just checked software repository of Fedora, and there is nvi! I also know that I saw elvis on several occasions, but there is no package in the Fedora repository.

Also, would recommend that you read comments (there are funny ones) and a short history of Vim written by its main author.