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Question: What CLI text editor do you use (and why)?

My Answer: For years, I've used pico as my console text editor on various servers. I tried vi and vim, I tried emacs. I even tried joe for awhile. But I keep coming back to pico.

Despite the fact that I believe pico stands for "Poor Ignorant Console Operator," my text editing tasks aren't very large. I rarely need to copy and paste (and when I do, Terminal's copy-paste works fine). The search capabilities of pico are fine for me. I can page up and down pretty easily. There are no confusing modes (vi, I'm looking at you). It may be the most Mac-like console-based text editor out there.

I realize that I'm not even on the ladder of console text editors, let alone on the bottom rung. Just yesterday I installed nano (and aliased 'pico' to it in case old habits kick in) in an attempt to crawl just a little closer to that ladder.

Go ahead, hate on me all you want, and tell me which text editor you use and why.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

You know, I have a strong feeling that these Zune ads are going to completely miss their audience. They're horrible.

What does "find your audience" have to do with a device that plays music? Do modern teens really get into pit-bull fighting? How is the music appealing to anyone that isn't into bad emo ((Admittedly I have no idea what emo music really is, but if I were to guess, watered down rock/pop sounds about right.))?

I really only have one question: how do you "die instantly" in a press? Nothing about a press sounds instant enough.

The robots are getting smarter.

For the most part, I've moved to MediaTemple. This domain (nslog.com) will actually be the last one to move on this site (though the database is currently being hosted on the new server as a trial). barzeski.com moved yesterday.

Currently, I'm waiting for the DNS changes to take place for a few sites, like billiardsdrills.com and iacas.org. MediaTemple must be a bit behind some other folks, or something has gone just a little wrong, because several of the domains I transferred today aren't being picked up by MT's nameservers just yet.

I'm hoping the (dv)3 upgrade is rolled out soon. vBulletin requires MySQL ((Not MovableType as I originally brain farted.)) 4.x, and the (dv)2 plan only includes 3.23.58.

Slugger lets you use tags in your post to define the WordPress "slug" (which is used in the URL).

As soon as I finish the podcast I'm editing, I'm going to have to try this out. I hope that the slug and tags are removed from the entry after the slug is created. I don't want them hanging around in case I ever remove Slugger.

Update: Slugger doesn't actually remove the slugs. Bummer. Here's to version 0.3!

iTunes 7.0.2 showed up in my Software Update as having the ability to use the second-generation Shuffle, so I installed it. Oddly, it then updated my iTunes Library. Odd.

My daily listening includes a few video podcasts (namely Ze Frank's The Show), a few audio podcasts, and whatever's in my Shuffle Play. I almost always use iTunes in its miniaturized mode.

Sometimes I'll hear Ze Frank speaking, but no (separate) video window will appear. If I open the video window, watch the show, and then begin playing the next song, the album art appears.

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I'm considering switching hosting companies. Interland's pricing - I have two VPS Root accounts - pales in comparison to, say, mediatemple's (dv) (("Dedicated Virtual")) hosting plans. I know Judi is happy with mediatemple (I feel odd not capitalizing the "m" and the "t"), and their (dv) plans (see above.

I'm looking to move for a few reasons:

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Since converting this blog to WordPress about a week ago, I've had problems with the site. Since the MT->WP upgrade took place shortly ((mere minutes)) after upgrading the server's software components (PHP, Perl, MySQL, Apache, etc.), I thought perhaps something had gone wrong in the process.

The problems? MySQL would spike to 25% or higher. Server loads would hit 10, 15, or even 25. Messages about failures to allocate memory would spew into my SSH terminal, my email client error logs, and all manner of things would go wonky and haywire.

When I was able to log on via SSH, I could kill apache for a few minutes and things would quiet down. I could restart MySQL and things would quiet down. But occasionally, the server was so far gone I couldn't do anything but ride it out for anywhere from five minutes to a few hours - I couldn't even SSH in to try to stop things.

Tonight I may have discovered the solution.

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Jesper's ThisService will take any OSA-style script as well as shell scripts which handle STDIN and STDOUT and turn it into a service. You can even configure a keyboard shortcut.

I recently (yesterday) re-did my services menu with Service Scrubber, which freed up enough space to add a few nifty little one-trick ponies via ThisService.

Scorecard, a golf statistics application for Mac OS X, has reached version 1.1. First released in August, Scorecard is the first shipping application from the successor to Freshly Squeezed Software. That company - owned by long-time FSS member Brad Miller - is Cynical Peak, and Brad and I share a company blog as well.

Scorecard 1.1 primarily adds the ability to print scorecards custom-built for keeping Scorecard-specific statistics. I tend to keep these same stats on the standard golf card, but sometimes it's nice to have a printout. Additionally, there are some bug fixes and other feature requests.

Scorecard costs $29.95 and can be downloaded from http://cynicalpeak.com/.

The disc-burning application Disco has been in the news quite a bit lately. Though I've been dealing with this blog's conversion to WordPress, I did have time this weekend to burn a few discs.

Disco is, if nothing else, already a success in terms of marketing. The team's cleverly crafted blog and tremendous attention to detail in the user interface, as well as their ambitious jokes about "having Toast for breakfast," have already primed the app for a Delicious Library-like launch (albeit at a lower price). In fact, it's now available in public beta, and I imagine the number of downloads will be quite high.

Marketing success is one thing, but if the application falls on its face, that momentum will quickly be lost. And Disco, unfortunately, will have to worry about its continued success after people have actually used it.

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Currently I have a lot of WordPress plugins enabled. WordPress seemingly needs a lot more than MovableType to provide functionality MT provides out of the box (or via configurable settings that are somewhat well documented). The plugins are…

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Gravatar.com owner Tom Werner says in "Gravatar 2.0 Update" that he hopes to have the site back up and "running as early as the beginning of next week."

He said that over two weeks ago, and the site is still not up. I've turned on Gravatar support here at NSLog();, and will check the site for the next week or so before turning it off. I'd gladly donate if it was working. After all, I like seeing images associated with people in forums, so I likely will here on my blog, too.

For months now, across a G5 and a Mac Pro, I've had problems with my dock failing to respond to the keyboard shortcut cmd-opt-D to toggle the "Auto-Hide" feature.

I'd press the keys. The dock (which I almost always leave visible) would start to duck down (it's at the bottom of my screen). Then it would spring back up. Checking the menu or the system preference reveals that the auto-hide feature is left in the same state it was in before pressing the keyboard shortcut.

Manually clicking works. Witness this 2.1 MB video.

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