Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend about a sponsor for a project he works on (in academia). Apparently, the sponsor decided that to be buzzword-compliant, they are to move from one software system they've been using (which is quite good) to another software system that's pretty similar (but sucks). Sponsors, being as clueless as they generally are, are known to make technical decisions that they hardly understand. Unfortunately, this software they've been told to use will make producing a working project harder. My friend remarked that to go against what the sponsor wants would be looking a gift horse in the mouth, or shooting oneself in the foot. I remarked that to use the lousy software would be to shoot oneself in the other foot. It's wonderful that they're left with a choice between feet to shoot. What a wonderful world. It'll be a challenge to produce a project that can walk at the end of the day.

Today, while editing a file, I wanted to look up a less-well-known feature of my preferred editor, vim. I like vim a lot because it's very fast and small, and has far more functionality than I use, so if I ever need something I don't yet know how to do, I can likely just look it up in the manual. I happened across a separate mode of vim called evim, which promises to be modeless and easy (vi having two main modes is a common barrier for people learning to use it). So, I start it up, via "vim -y" as the documentation suggests, and it is indeed modeless. And.. I can't get out of it. I can't switch into command mode to quit (or save, or anything), and no keyboard shortcuts work, instead just inserting themselves as literals, which in other circumstances would be kind of cool. So, I look at the manpage, and find out a few things. Firstly, it's also known as "Vim for gumbies", who if memory serves, are the brain-damaged londoners from Monty Python who stagger about and say stupid things. "When using evim you are expected to take a handkerchief, make a knot in each corner and wear it on your head." I love using Unix. There are a lot of clever people who do clever things and don't take themselves too seriously. I then see that evim is always meant to be run from the GUI, because it won't work without the menubars. Aha! So that's why I couldn't leave it when I ran it from the shell. How clever of them to provide a way to enter it where I can't leave. I make a mental note never to invoke it that way again, and instead fire it up in graphical mode as "evim". It's nice now, and while I still wouldn't give it to windows users new to Unix (I'd probably give them gedit or nano), I could imagine them using it in a pinch. Then I notice that the menus have, in parentheses, all the keyboard shortcuts for command mode, which evim doesn't have. I can tell they really have thought this through for new users to vim. Let's make a simplified, modeless vim for new users, and in the menus for it add keyboard shortcuts that don't work. I'm sure they'll feel very welcome indeed.

I also found some really great brain analysis software for MacOSX recently. It's called OsiriX, and it can nicely do some things that no other software I've seen can. I'm fortunate to have a Mac, a Windows box, and a Linux box on my desk at work -- I have all the software opportunity I might want available to me. Anyhow, Osirix does a lot of the stuff that the separate analysis tools we use do, and I hope it sees some use in our lab.