FastSoft Blog

Posted by Ryan Witt (FastSoft Software Development Lead) on...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:43:00 -0800

Posted by Ryan Witt (FastSoft Software Development Lead) on onecreativeblog:

The FastSoft engineers often give presentations to bring each-other up to date on technical issues. These presentations are appropriately called “speedups” (get it? fastsoft? speedups? har har). This speedup, given by @kriskowal, is a tricks and tips discussion on his favorite editor, vim.

“Slides” for this presentation:

Or, for those without javascript enabled, here is a plain version:

^w hjkl move to windows

^w HJKL move windows

^w +- horizontal resize
^w = even splits
^w10<> vertical resize

O
I  ia  A
o

gg
0     ^      $
G

{
}

:!

   /----------------------\
   |:e :e# :vs :sp ^w hjkl|
   |:e :e# :vs :sp ^w hjkl|
   |:e :e# :vs :sp ^w hjkl|
   |:e :e# :vs :sp ^w hjkl|
   \----------------------/

:n :N

Vv^V o
>> <<
=
:set et sw ts
:!expand unexpand
gq
:set ve=all
comment/uncomment
:set incsearch n N
:noh
:set tw

highlight OverLength ctermbg=red ctermfg=white guibg=red guifg=white
match OverLength '\%78v.*'

:set modeline
:set wrap lbr number
/ n .

Sharing Open Source HTML Virtual Terminal

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:08:00 -0800

Posted by Kris Kowal (FastSoft Sourcerer)

Last month, we experimented with integrating Ajaxterm with Django. Ajaxterm is a polling HTTP based terminal emulator that can provide a web interface for a local SSH or login session with all the glory of ASCII and Ncurses so you can administer your system or edit configuration files with Vim or, in a pinch, Emacs. The heart of the terminal emulator is a Terminal class to which you can write the output of a pseudo-terminal stream and from which you can periodically read a block of HTML representing the complete terminal window state. We needed to “pickle” (serialize in Java parlance) Terminal instances so that they could be picked up by Django’s round-robin FastCGI processes. We refactored Terminal such that it’s serializable and posted a Github gist for your use.

The original terminal class created instance methods on initialization. Pickles can’t serialize instance methods, so all of these had to be converted into class methods. To do that, using mostly the same code, we moved the method definition code into a Terminal metaclass. For more information about metaclasses, I wrote an article about a year ago on my personal “Ask a Wizard” blog.

Textile to HTML Converter

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:33:00 -0800

Posted by Kris Kowal (FastSoft Sourcerer)

We use the Textile markup language at FastSoft. Specifically, we use a Python implementation of the Textile to HTML converter attributed to Roberto A. F. De Almeida, Mark Pilgrim, and Dean Allen. The original implementation was a bit dated and it didn’t have support for Unicode in Python 2, so we wrote our own. We’re happy to share our fork of textile.py. We hope you find this code useful.

Pasadena Pyrocumulus Clouds

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Posted by Ryan Witt (FastSoft Software Development Lead)

This is a view from a conference room in our Pasadena office of a pyrocumulus cloud from the Los Angeles station fire.

Update: This appears to be an intentionally set backfire according to the Pasadena Star News.