Evil Empire

This text provides another view on Anti-Americanism in Germany than the one we are used to. Nothing to add from me.

Edit, March 31st: There is another article that covers the European approach to islamic fanatism.

Eurosys 2007

I spent most part of my last week in Lisbon, Portugal. Besides being an interesting (albeit surprisingly western-European) city, it was the location of this year's EuroSys conference. Although it was just the 2nd such event, I think the organizers are on their way of establishing it as one of the major systems conferences world-wide. There were quite some nice ideas in the conference and I'd like to point you to my favorite papers from this conference.

Some of these papers are not available yet, I'll try to update the links some time in the future.

• Marek Olszewski, Adam Czajkowski, Keir Mierle, Angela Demke Brown: JIT instrumentation - a novel approach to dynamically instrument operating systems
• Anil Madhavapeddy, Alex Ho, Tim Deegan, David Scott and Ripduman Sohan: Melange: Creating a functional internet (not online yet.)
• Joseph Tucek, James Newsome, Shan Lu, Chengdu Huang, Spiros Xanthos, David Brumley, Yuanyuan Zhou and Dawn Song: Sweeper: A Lightweight End-to-End System for Defending Against Fast Worms.
• Kristis Makris, Kyung Ryu: Dynamic and Adaptive Updates of Non-Quiescent Subsystems in Commodity Operating System Kernels. (not online yet.)
• Sameh Elnikety, Steven Dropsho, Willy Zwaenepoel: Tashkent+ - memory-aware load balancing and update filtering in replicated databases
• Jake Wires, Mike Feeley: Secure file system versioning at the block level (not online yet.)
  

HipHop can also be music...

Normally I'm not a fan of hiphop or rap music. I don't even know the difference. ;)

However, yesterday I discovered Monzy and his really nerdy first song called "Kill Dash Nine". I love it, because it is full of geekisms. My favourite part is "I last a mythical man-month, you a one-minute man."

VIM

My favourite editor, vim, is a very complex tool. If you search the web, you will find many places, where people tell you that even if you are an experienced vim user, you only know a subset of its features. Every once in a while you get to know another useful feature.

Vim is sometimes also annoying. For instance I was oftentimes annoyed when I hit the q key followed by another key and ended up in macro recording mode. Before I learned that I could exit this mode by hitting q another time in comand mode, I was really frustrated. Thereafter it only got on my nerves. Until today I decided to find out what's so interesting about this record mode.

By hitting q you tell vim that you want to record a macro. If you hit a number or a letter thereafter, you tell vim into which register you want this macro to be stored. So hitting qq will end up recording a macro into register q. Now you can do anything you want with vim: insert text, search for things, open new files, ... When you are done, hit q for another time. Now the macro is recorded and you can re-run it using @ where is the name of the register you stored your macro in.

This feature came in handy today. I had to wrap a lot of one-liners with #ifdef X and #endif. So I recorded a macro that

1. Entered insert mode.
2. Opened a new line.
3. Inserted #ifdef X
4. Moved one line down.
5. Opened another new line.
6. Inserted #endif
7. Exited insert mode.

Thereafter the boring task of inserting those ifdef's was just some keystrokes and I realized that I should have learned this feature earlier.

Now can somebody tell me how I can store macros for reusing them later on?