Wrangle That Text

I’m taking a nice break for lunch today. The cafe has a baked potato…sounds good! And I’m going to read a bit. I just got Glenn Fleishman’s new book, “Take Control of BBEdit.”

Yes, I’m reading a book about a text editor. I’m a nerd…live with it! :-)

BBEdit is of course the wonderful text editor created by Rich Siegel and available over at Bare Bones Software. Of course, everyone knows about BBEdit and it’s long history, at least everyone who works on computers. And by computers, I mean Macs, of course.

“But BBEdit already has a 400+ page users manual. Just read that,” You say. True, but the users manual is 400+ pages! and great sections of it are geared toward html editing. There’s nothing wrong with that. After all, BBEdit got it’s start that way, and it is a leading html editor, but I use it for manipulating text, like this blog post. And as others have pointed out, it’s only $5 for the e-book version. Hard to beat.

Text Factories are a cool, relatively new feature, that I don’t have a lot of experience with. Glenn does a good job of explaining and giving some real world examples of their use.

Arguably BBEdit’s greatest strength is search, and the impressive multi-file built in grep search and replace. I’m a big fan of using TK as a place holder when I’m writing, and the BBEdit search result window and document pane make simple work of the ‘To Come’ items.

A good example from the book is one of the challenges for us old-timers, the dreaded double-space after a period. Here’s a quick find/replace[1]:

Find Replace Image

Much good stuff!

If you wrangle text for a hobby or a living, you need to look at BBEdit, and you should check out Take Control of BBEdit.

Enjoy!

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1. Note the space after the \1  ↩

Last of the Summer Wine

It's the name of an English comedy show. Last of the Summer Wine ran for 31 season starting in 1973. The show is about three older gentlemen who, in their retirement, manage a certain amount of mischief and teenage like zeal. The show contains a great deal of farce, and innuendo.

Norman Clegg is the main character. Well - in most of the popular seasons, the main characters are Clegg, Compo, and Foggy. But, the Foggy character comes and goes through the seasons, and in '99 the actor, Bill Owen, playing Compo died. The one constant is Clegg (played by actor Peter Sallis).

Clegg is the middle of the road character. Foggy is ex military and always 'In Charge', while Compo is a scruffy, ill mannered scalawag. But Clegg is the steady voice of reason. He also has the best some of the best lines.

What draws me to the show is the camaraderie these three gents enjoy.

Some shows, like MASH, tell a tense, often tragic story laced with humor. Don't get me wrong, I loved mash. Great show. And it is, was, no...is a common formula. It speaks to the deep frustrations we all feel. Look at the brilliant All In The Family. The show portrayed the gruff bigoted Archie going toe to toe with the younger hippie Michael, while Edith provided a balance between the extremes.

The balance is important. So is the humor. One lesson from these great shows, don't take life too seriously.

Enjoy!

The Battle For Rights

At times change seems to happen so fast, like the world is spinning out of control. At other times, the world feels stagnant, even slipping backward, like we’re stuck in a slowly hardening ooze.

Of course, there are still the same number of hours in the day as there were in the ‘70’s, and people still look for the same basic needs: shelter, food, love.

Has anything changed?

We do have the ability to share information at an amazing speed. Most folks have more computing power on their person than could have been dreamed of in the ‘70’s.

Despite the fact that we are growing technologically faster each year in an exponential climb to the singularity (nice nerd reference for you), we still live in a world where 1 in 7 people in the world do not have enough food.

It seems unthinkable.

So, when faced with those realities, it’s hard to find the time to be concerned about equality battles here in the US.

But we need to. It is all part of the same problem of inequity. We apply arbitrary rules to some and as a result deny.

Democrats argue that same-sex marriage is a matter of civil rights, and that civil rights should not be subject to referendum. They note that the last time the state put a question of civil rights on the ballot, in 1915, the male voters of New Jersey declined to allow women the right to vote.

I read an interesting science post a while back. I’d link to it if I could find it, but the gist was we haven’t found others in the universe because intelligent life has a built in expiration date. In other words, as a society grows more and more rapidly, it inevitably fails because of its own hubris. So the odds of another culture reaching our level of technology and sustaining it long enough to make their presence known in the universe is extremely rare.

So why do I care about equality? I’m not planning on getting married anytime soon. I guess my primary motivation is the elimination of bigotry. And who knows, maybe marriage is in my future. If so, I want to make sure my loved ones have the same rights as everyone else.

Enjoy!

The Week Begins

HIMSS (Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society) starts this week.

It is only Tuesday AM and it already feels like a long week. Just kidding. The truth is travel days wear me out. It was uneventful for the most part. Only hiccup was in Atlanta. We boarded the very large 767, got all ready to go, but something was wrong with a fuel gauge. So we got off the plane, Delta pulled another one out of the garage, we boarded it and left only a couple of hours late. It’s hard to complain about that. They did a good job.

I don’t feel I can say that often about an airline. It is a shame what has happened to air travel in the states.

Biz Stone of twitter fame (one of the cofounders) did the keynote and it was awesome! I don’t know how well it was received by the more stuffy CIO/Doctor types, but for us nerds in the audience, it was great!

He had a lot of good things to say.

One of the key messages he shared was the value of people and ideas. A couple of his ‘aphorisms’ really resonated with us. Particularly that it’s important to keep the customers in mind, coworkers have good intentions and often they have good ideas, and that fun is a very important part of success.

I couldn’t agree more. I’m very fortunate to have a job I genuinely enjoy and have fun doing.

Off to the vendor floor this afternoon. That’s really the big payoff for HIMSS. I come for the keynotes and the vendor floor. Frankly, we’re ahead of the game at Nemours and often doing things with technology that HIMSS won’t be talking about for a couple more years.

Enjoy!

Ever Have A Dream About Nose Hair?

No. Me neither.

It’s like the perfect front lawn. You spend hours on it. You know everyone driving by are going to see your well manacured lawn and say, “Damn! That guy takes care of his lawn!”

A few hours later, you look out the front window, just to admire your work and NOOOOO! There’s one weed standing straight and tall right in the middle of the yard.

Now everyone driving by, that’s all they are going to see. That damn weed. Their not going to see the well edged driveway or the trimmed hedges.

All you can do is march out there, and yank the thing out by the roots!

That’s better. Looks like a well groomed lawn again.