Moja škrabalica

• Your templating engine sucks and everything you have ever written is spaghetti code (yes, you)
• HN thread for the blog post above

  Making a pun on the post title: Every programmer is on a long, cyclical journey where every stepping stone feels like a new kind of enlightenment. Blogging allows them to share their brilliance with the world, showing how they are surely amongst the first to attain their new level of purity and zen. -- peteforde on HN

• On templating, and a shameless plug of Moulder
• Pure HTML templates theory, implemented as querytemplates
• scuery
• HTML::Zoom
• weld.js
• enlive
• CAST
• wicket (it is solving non-persistant selectors issue with custom attributes)
• hquery
• effigy
• meld

More examples? It should use nice-to-write DSL with CSS/jQuery like selectors, and be able to "compile" templates to PHP inlining the dynamic code (like querytemplates is doing). There should be no special syntax in HTML, except template inhertiance (master page) if no better option exists.

I like the name "template animation" (name by Iain Dooley) for doing this, even it is very bad for SEO. It sounds more fun than non-obtrusive HTML replacing others are talking about. In fact it is not just replacement, it is generation, conditionals and else. "Mockup-driven development" (name by judofyr on HN) is not bad as well.

Parsing XML documents with CSS selectors looks very useful.

Ubuntu Lucid has removed hal support which is required for (proprietary) Oracle VirtualBox to use local USB devices inside your VM. Until VirtualBox is eventually ported to the hal-less world you can start hal daemon before running VirtualBox as a workaround.

The solution is to get closed source free for evaluation and personal usage version of Oracle VirtualBox (you can use the package from the karmic repository), add yourself to the vboxusers group (if not already) and start hald in no daemon mode: sudo hald --daemon=no.

Use lsusb -v to get vendor/product ids if you would like to setup a filter inside VM USB controller properties so your local device can be auto connected when the VM starts.

I am using gedit quite a lot. It's reasonably fast and it provides some nice functionality via plugins.

But I don't like that gedit window stays open even when there are no tabs. I know that it's a feature, and that there is a CTRL+Q for closing gedit, it's just that I would like to use CTRL+W all the time.

Some time ago I patched gedit, but today I realized it's better to write this as a plugin so I can use standard package from Ubuntu and not have to rebuilt it by myself.

So, here it is — gedit tabclose plugin, version 1.0. README and INSTALL files are in the archive.

I read "Interactive Digital Photomontage" paper today, and I think that it is freaking amazing:

We describe an interactive, computer-assisted framework for combining parts of a set of photographs into a single composite picture, a process we call "digital photomontage."

As I can see, there exists an implementation in C++, released under GNU GPL, I don't have any clues how much effort it would take to have this feature enabled in F-spot but I believe it can be major reason for one to switch to it.

Also, I do like how Aperture can group stack frames, and unfold them only on request. Support for linked RAW files (stored on external removable media) is also very nice, but as I am not professional photographer, that's not important to me.

On the other hand, it would be nice to have some support for importing photos from iPhoto (and Aperture). I read once about some Perl script that can do that, but I can't find it right now.