Monthly Archives: January 2005

Edit PHP with SciTE

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If you edit PHP using SciTE, you should get more productive with it!

You can press F5 to run the current program and get output to a console.

Most web developers do not associate the console with making web pages, but there are gains in your development speed.
No webserver is involved when running the PHP executable as is. No overhead, just what PHP outputs after interpreting your source code.

When you press F5 in SciTE you run PHP with its standard parameters. This might be at odds with your
current host for your current project. Say, the error_reporting setting is way too low, and spouts
meaningless notices at you, slowing down your eye-scanning.

Not acceptable.

What we do is configure the command line that launches the PHP executable from within SciTE. I did that like this:
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More stuff done with Ruby: Ta-da List

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OK, here is web usability gods 37Signals‘ won fluff on their very usable web app for making todo lists online:

To Do with Ta-da List: Simple sharable to-do lists. To-do list, todo list, task manager, task list, todo task, easy list, simple todo, free todo list manager.

What blew me away is that they made a mini video for us to see all the features in the thing. More and more nifty small things are packed with applications of high usability, and we Windows users have a hard time getting to the nifty stuff as we are so used to the loops, hoops and have-tos of Bad Software. That video showed me two or three things I had not seen while signing up.

And the FORM for signing up is a miracle of communication. I like big letters. And colors used to convey different levels of importance, that was smart, too.

Saved by GNU tools

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GnuWin32 Packages is the official list of GNU tools for the win32 platform.

Some of these tools are pure magic. diff rules, and I felt all broken when my Cygwin install broke, because all my settings in diff were perfect there. Now I don’t even have to open the bash commandline, the tools are on my path, in Windows.

Handy.

When I grow up I am going to start using patch, too. Applying patches as I go along!

Edit: OK, the best packages are those that give you the filesystem commands from UNIX, fileutils.

With these things installed, you do not have to get used to the Windows command-line commands again.

Theory of translations

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I have begun reading Introducing Translation Studies, by Jeremy Munday, as I am trying my hand at commercial translation. _Dolmetscher_ is the slightly derogatory term for commercial translators. It was coined by 19th century theologian Schleiermacher, who still is a defining influence on translation theories. (Most things that folks in T Studies are doing nowadays are in response to some conecpt or thought of his (!), according to Munday.) The other, artistic and literary kind of translator he calls _Übersetzer_.

“Number One With A Bullet”, explained

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I was snooping around for the hidden meaning of the term “number one with a bullet”. Its meaning could not only be the movie with the same name. And, of course there was more to the story.

I’m glad you asked, flow. As a matter of fact, the term “number one with a bullet” originated with Billboard Magazine’s (110 years!) charting system. When a song or album is number one, it has the most sales or spins out of anything else. when an item on a Billboard chart has a bullet by it, it means that those sales or spins are climbing higher than they were the week before. So a “number one with a bullet” is a song/album that not only is number one, but still continues to climb in terms of sales/spins. So it’s a number one with a vengeance.

Source

Here is an example of the chart in 1964:

(Note, no bullet illustration in this one.)