David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • HTML tag matching in vim

    My Vim knowledge sure comes in handy when I need to edit code from the command line and when it comes to hand coding large HTML, CSS, or PHP files, I’m thankful for the matchit vim tag matching macro. It doesn’t come activated by default (I found that out after re-installing OS X from scratch).…

  • Cyberduck + Textmate = Awesome

    I’ve been using EditPad Pro for web development on a Windows PC because it has an integrated FTP tool. With EditPad Pro, you can ftp to your production web server, list all of the files and easily edit any of them in place (code highlighting and all). I got used to the tool, but could…

  • Paste as plain text in Outlook

    I use Outlook at work and a lot of the information I send out in messages is copied from various sources to the clipboard and then to the pasted into the new message dialog. One thing that has always annoyed me about this process is that by default in Outlook the underlying styling/formatting of the…

  • A smarter iFrame with PHP

    Depending on site design, it can often be much quicker to embed dynamic content  in an iframe which already has your site’s header and footer. The problem with this approach is that _blank links pointing to said content will not open in the iframe, but instead in a window without your site’s design. Here’s how…

  • DIY Forms Solved by WordPress

    If you use WordPress, you’re probably familiar with the admin interface’s widgets tool. It a super easy user interface (UI) that allows users enable/disable elements by dragging them into a designated area. Gravity Forms has ingeniously utilized this concept to allow users create web based forms by dragging and dropping fields. But wait! There’s more.…

  • OSX Finder – Missing Features

    I’ll admit it. I was kinda curious when Apple announced its latest overhaul of OSX called Lion today. Upon further analysis, however, it seems that most of the “improvements” are going to be cosmetic in nature and functionality will take a back seat. This makes me sad because I feel that the Finder in OSX…

  • Wait a sec, Mr batch file!

    Today I sifted through the first 4 pages of Google search results on ‘pause batch file’ only to find that none of the suggestions work on Windows 2008 server. Why are all of these pages suggesting sleep.exe and choice.com and ping -n when the obvious solution is the timeout command? More importantly why is it…

  • Email & track a thousand subsribers for free

    MailChimp is the email campaign service I’ve been looking for. It offers free beautiful email templates, ISP feedback loops and subscriber response tracking. Signing up for a free account will let you generate beautiful email campaigns for up to a thousand subscribers and let you send six thousand emails a month.

  • Farmers Market Caprese Salad

    This weekend I had time to stop by the farmers market. I picked up some gorgeous tomatoes and ultra fragrant purple basil which I threw that together with some fresh mozzarella and balsamic vinaigrette at lunch time. It turned out to be a really wonderful little caprese salad that’s simple to make with the right…

  • Quickly find previously executed commands in bash

    Type a command, hit enter, type another command, hit enter…that’s still how it goes in terminal computing. That’s not to say that there haven’t been innovations in command line. Bash history recall using the up/down keys is just one of those examples. To quickly search for and find specific previously executed commands in bash and/or…