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Look At Your Data - John Rauser

While I couldn't make it to this year's O'Reilly Velocity 2011 I'm excited so the videos are available to watch for free. My favourite talk from last year was John Rauser's "TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance".

This year John delivered an excellent talk entitled look at your data. He demonstrated how looking at averages hides a lot of what's really going on and identifies how toolmakers might improve their offerings.

Modern monitoring software makes it easy to plot a statistic like average latency every minute -- too easy. Fancy dashboards of time series plots often lull us into a false sense of security. Underneath every point on those plots is a distribution, and underneath that distribution is a series of individuals: your customers. - John Rauser

Making vim look like textmate (again!)

A few years ago I posted about my quest to make editing ruby in my terminal as beautiful as in Textmate. I've been back on linux for a year now but it's only tonight I've gotten around to sorting out my vim display.

RedCar, an open source cross platform alternative to TextMate, reminded me how pretty code can look. Tonight I worked out how to make vim on ubuntu lucid look just as lovely.

  1. Grab the twilight256 colorscheme and drop it into ~/.vim/colors/twilight256.vim
  2. Make sure you're using 256 color terminal (I put this in ~/.bashrc) export TERM=xterm-256color
  3. Tell vim to use this colorscheme (I put it in ~/.vimrc) colorscheme twilight256
  4. In my terminal under "Edit" -> "Profile Preferences" I selected "Deja Vu Sans Mono Book" "13"

I can't believe it took me so long to do this but I'm glad I finally have.

Ruby can look pretty under Vim on Linux

Vim Syntax Highlighting for Rails

A couple of days I updated the font settings in terminal.app on my mac. It's now in line with textmate using Anti-Aliased 14 point DejaVu Sans mono.

Terminal Window Settings

I think you'll agree, it's pretty.

Vim Syntax Highlighting

Now I want to get my vim syntax highlighting to mirror that in Textmate. My vim doesn't currently understand rhtml. I also want it to use the same colorscheme (Sunburst) that my Textmate is using.Who will join my quest?

update big response from the lists.

Install rails.vim so it will recognize .rhtml files. It also touts "easy file navigation, enhanced syntax highlighting, and more"

Install vividchalk.vim, a colorscheme like Vibrant Ink for Textmate. Apparently it has a 16 color mode for remote terminal support. I still want to find Sunburst but at least I could always make one based on this.

The Rails Wiki has a page on HowtoUseVimWithRails

Stay tuned!