It was about 8 months ago when I started using vimpress. And I’ve actually modified it a bit since then. So far I’ve made two tiny changes.

The first is checking for vim python support before doing anything. I did this because in Debian vim (vim.basic) isn’t compiled with python support, and I prefer vim.basic over vim.gtk or vim.gnome as my default vim (and as for the reason, see my previous vimpress post.

The second is adding a :BlogSave command. Basically sending and saving an entry without publishing it, i.e. saving it as a draft, which I do a lot myself.

I’ve kept it in my git repo now at git://pigeond.net/vimpress.git

Gitweb at http://pigeond.net/git/?p=vimpress.git

A couple of weeks ago, one of the fellows (yes, you, MSmith) from the Island Virtual Airways, the virtual airline based on FlightGear, poked me and was asking me if there is a way to show only their airline pilots on FGMap. After spending a few coding train trips, I’ve added a very simple pilot filtering feature. Currently you can filter by the callsign and the aircraft. It also has query string support, so you can do things like http://mpmap02.flightgear.org/?pilots_filter_callsign=blah

Check it out at http://mpmap02.flightgear.org/. Code is in my usual git repo.

Enjoy…

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So I’m not going to say or type too much here.

There. My daugher, Livia, 5-month old.

Yes. I should have done this earlier.

We are having a daughter soon!

My wife and I now have a baby blog up and running. It has pretty much entirely in chinese though. So for those english speaking/reading people, let me do a quick summary of what’s been happening.

Our daughter is about 6-month old now, and the EDC is around the end of November. We are having the baby born in Taiwan.

To me, one of the coolest things with this was the ultrasound. You kinda wish you have one at home so you can watch the baby any time. Here are some of the early ultrasound of our daughter when we were in Taiwan:

8 weeks old

10 weeks old

And here are two video clips from the fetal morphology. The test was very detailed. The doctor pretty much checked everything, from sizes of the hands, legs, shapes and structures of the head, face, bones, spine, to heart, organs, and blood flows. That was also when we first found out the gender of our baby.

Looks like our baby was drinking…

Our baby punching! And if you watch close enough, you can also see a bubble coming out of her nose at the same time. Plus you can see her heart beating.

For the last month or so, my wife had also started to feel a lot of the moving going on too. The baby seems to move more after my wife having a meal or lying down. You can feel it if you put your hand on the tummy. And also once we actually saw the tummy moving as the baby (presumably) kicked.

We also started buying a few baby stuff, like the car restrain and some stuff for bathing.

It’s all coming along…

This is a test…

Well, not really.

I was looking for an alternative to posting blog entries using the web interface, and was randomly trying a few apps in Debian. There were drivel and gnome-blog but they don’t seem to support tags. BloGTK seems to, but there’s something weird about how it does, and it doesn’t support multiple categories. BloGTK is also being removed from Debian.

Then I came across vimpress – a vim plugin for wordpress. It’s simple, but it does what I needed. You can get a list of your blog entires, post a new blog, or even edit an existing blog. So I’m testing it with this blog entry and see how it goes.

The only small rant, not to vimpress, but to Debian’s vim, is that vimpress needs vim’s python support, but it’s not built into the vim.basic binary, which I prefer over vim.gtk or vim.gnome. One of the reasons is when I ctrl-z to background vim, and then foreground it (fg), it sometimes (not all the time) gets stuck unless I hit ctrl-c. This does not happen with vim.basic, but only vim.gtk and vim.gnome.

I did try to trace it and it is when the function mch_suspend calling pause(), which causes vim to wait for a signal.

Perhaps I should report to vim later…

I’ve been keeping a git repo of my own for FlightGear for quite some time. I was using Tailor for importing CVS into git, since git-cvsimport seems to be an issue with the branches in FlightGear’s CVS. Tailor is very powerful, and work among over 10 different revision control systems.

On the other hand, I’ve been having some issues with tailor. Not until much much much later (about a week ago) that I discovered the cause and possibly the remedy. At the same time one of the FlightGear developers Tim Moore has figured out why git-cvsimport wasn’t happy, and more importantly how to make it happy.

And so I’ve re-imported FlightGear and SimGear source from scratch and it’s been going well so far. But for those who have been using my repo, you will have to re-clone it again.

I’ve also imported the FlightGear data repo, but beware, it’s rather big even for git. The bare repo is almost 1G. So if you’re happy with your current CVS checkout, I suggest you not to bother with my git one. Mind you, that’s the entire history. Considering a checkout is about 1.7G, that’s not too bad. I’ve also set a 512kB/s limit for my git upstream, just in case there are like 20 people cloning the data repo at the same time :)