I’ve been trying to make Vim 7 compile with the Microsoft Visual C++ 2003 Toolkit, as a favor to Bram Moolenaar, the primary author of Vim. He wants to be able to use the free compiler as the primary build tool for the Win32 version of Vim.

Oh. My. God.

The VC2003 toolkit may include a full optimizing compiler, but it’s certainly far from a complete system for building Windows binaries.

First, I discovered that it came only with the C library headers, but not the Windows headers. That was easily rectified. Download the Platform SDK. Just the Windows Core SDK subset. This also got me nmake.

At this point, I was able to compile Vim, but not …continue.

A useful compendium of health risks associated with excessive computer usage: Is Your Computer Killing You? RSI, eye strain, deep-vein thrombosis, insomnia, etc.

A little app that I find useful in reminding me to take occasional breaks is Workrave. Though I’ve gotten all too good at ignoring it.

Time for a break.

Bill Shatner doing Elton John’s Rocket Man. Be sure to watch the last 30 seconds or so.

This morning, I sent the following letter to the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Senator,

Your job last week was to show up Samuel Alito as the extremist that he is.

You failed. You were out­ma­neu­vred by the Re­pub­li­cans and you did not make a compelling case when you had the spotlight on you. Instead many of you were, rightfully, pilloried as bloviating blowhards.

Do you really want your legacy to be that you swung the Supreme Court to the right for three decades? Do you want to remembered as one who lost Roe v. Wade? That you placed someone with a track record of priv­i­leg­ing the executive branch on the …continue.

I re-read Scott Hanselman’s blog post on using Consolas as the Windows Console Font, and I decided to put together a registry file to make it a little simpler. (You’ll have to rename the file to console-font.reg after down­load­ing.)

The registry file includes entries for:

• Andale Mono
• DejaVu Sans Mono (an extended version of Bitstream Vera)
• Consolas

As Scott says:

(I’m afraid I can’t distribute Consolas online or provide a download out of abject fear. That said, you can find it in any version of the Longhorn bits.)

Or Office 12, I believe.

Update, 2008/01/15. The Consolas Font Pack is the easiest way to get Consolas, if you don’t have Office 2007 or Vista. Tech­ni­cal­ly, you are supposed to have Visual Studio 2005. (I’m guessing that …continue.

On Tuesday night, I felt like Imelda Marcos. I conducted a long-overdue purge of my closet, leaving me with two large boxes of clothes, mostly shirts and t-shirts. I probably got rid of 80% of my collection of Microsoft shirts. All in all, I had 63 empty hangars in the closet when I was done. Yikes!

Lately, I’ve been dressing a little better. More button-down shirts, fewer t-shirts. Not that there’s been any pressure to do so at work – the geeks at Atlas are just as badly, er, informally dressed as at any other software company that I’ve worked at.

Via DailyKos: some of the nation’s leading libraries have books bound in human skin.

I made this recipe for Thanks­giv­ing. It was a big hit.

Mustard-Mushroom Soup recipe from CDKitchen.com:

In­gre­di­ents

• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 pounds mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 4 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)
• 1/2 cup dry Sherry
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
• Salt and freshly ground pepper
• 1 cup whipping cream

Directions

Melt butter in heavy large saucepan over medium-high heat and cook until lightly browned. Add mushrooms and cook until liquid evaporates, stirring frequently, about 10 minutes. Add stock, Sherry and mustard and simmer briskly 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add cream and warm through. Serve im­me­di­ate­ly.

At our Sixth Day of Christmas party yesterday, Delf started talking about burns from hot peppers, which reminded me of a crazy thread that I read a while back, Listening to habeneros, and of a sure-fire cure for hiccups from Diane Duane.

Me, when I get hiccups, I just take a very deep breath and hold it for as long as I can. If it doesn’t work the first time, it does on the second attempt.

Cure #1, letting a large spoonful of sugar dissolve in the mouth, is the only cure that’s ever worked for Emma.

Here’s Diane Duane on curing hiccups:

Hiccups are the result of a blood serum elec­trolyte balance. …continue.

vi. Vee-eye. My text editor of choice for 20 years. Half my life.

Why? Because I imprinted on vi, like a duckling on its mother. Vi’s keystrokes are bound into my muscle memory. My fingers re­flex­ive­ly use vi keystrokes to move around, to delete text, to move blocks, to find patterns. I don’t have to think about using dw to delete a word, or n to find the next match of a pattern, or yG to yank the rest of a file, or j to move down a line, or . to repeat the last mod­i­fi­ca­tion. My sub­con­cious does it for me.

I don’t even have to think much about more complex commands, like ct) to replace a …continue.