ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

March, 2010

How to use Vim’s textwidth like a pro

There are lots of little blog posts containing advice about various one-line options you can do in Vim. This post falls into that category, but I'm hoping to do a more comprehensive view into one small subsystem of Vim's configuration: automatic line wrapping. When programming, automatic line wrapping can be a little obnoxious because even […]

  • March 5, 2010

Third-party unattended upgrades in three steps

unattended-upgrades is a nifty little package that will go ahead and automatically install updates for you as they become enabled. No serious system administrator should use this (you are testing updates before pushing them to the servers, right?) but for many personal uses automatic updates are really what you want; if you run sudo aptitude […]

  • March 3, 2010

Writing generator friendly code

I've come a long ways from complaining to the html5lib list that the Python version gratuitously used generators, making it hard to port to PHP. Having now drunk the laziness kool-aid in Haskell, I enjoy trying to make my code fit the generator idiom. While Python generators have notable downsides compared to infinite lazy lists […]

  • March 1, 2010