vim tips: capitalize the first word of every sentence

To solve this problem i found this useful solution, but discovered that it didn't cover all cases i had.

s/\v(\U)([^\.]*\.)/\u\1\L\2/g

To start with, \U does not mean every not-uppercase letter, but every character from the whole set that is not uppercase. So it includes spaces and everything else. This causes the expression to match " hello world!" if the sentence doesn't start at the beginning of the line, which is not quite what we want. To get every non-uppercase (that is lowercase) letter use \l. But even that does not really work, because it means that now it matches "Hello world." as "ello world.", and we get a transformation as "HEllo world!". Again, not what we are looking for. Unfortunately, until someone can suggest a method to skip already capitalized sentences we have to stick to \w.

Next, the expression only excludes periods, but not question-marks, exclamations or other sentence ending characters. We can extend this by simply including the respective characters: [^\.?!:;]. We also do not need to enforce the terminating character, we can simply drop that. What we really want to match is the beginning of the sentence, we don't care about the end.

Also, unless the text is in all uppercase, lower-casing the second group could be counter productive as it would affect upper-cased acronyms etc. that are already there.

Lastly, we want to capture sentences spanning multiple lines, lest every line gets matched as a separate sentence. This is achieved using \_

Putting it all together we get s/\v(\w)(\_[^\.?!:;]*)/\u\1\2/g

Syndicated 2013-03-06 06:09:00 (Updated 2013-03-06 06:12:07) from DevLog

(moved) vim tips: capitalize the first word of every sentence

this article moved

Syndicated 2013-03-05 09:52:53 (Updated 2013-03-06 07:12:02) from DevLog

javascript frameworks

Since i already found last week that creating views with jquery is not easy i decided to explore alternatives first. Already from early check-ins i received recommendations for angular.js, knockout.js and backbone.js.

Taking this frame work comparison as a guide i excluded backbone.js, and because a friend from the singapore hackerspace had also recommended angular.js i started with that.

Implementation was straight forward. What i really liked was that i didn't have to redo my datastructure that i had made up beforehand, but angular.js allowed me to access and traverse the data in the form that it was available. After some trials i even managed to build that 3 levels deep nested loop. (Iterate over columns, then projects and then task-types)

Then i briefly tried knockout.js but dropped it quickly because it would have caused me to put ko.observable() all over the place. angular.js handles this way better in my opinion. It simply observes the whole dataset and checks for updates.

Other contenders from the above comparison table were ember.js and batman.js. I had a brief look at ember.js and found that similar to knockout it would force me to write a new object-based datastructure, so i dropped the idea. batman.js is written in coffeescript, which is interesting but i want to stick to pure javascript for now, so i'll explore that later.

Syndicated 2012-08-22 15:06:23 from DevLog

learning phonegap cordova

This weeks goal was to learn how to work with PhoneGap/Cordova. Because of that i figured i could just link a Phonegap tutorial for this weeks goal. The report video is worth watching though. It covers the PhoneGap installation with eclipse, which went smoothly following the instructions on the website. Another Highlight this week was that we received 6 "awesome" votes, which is enough to get us over the minimum of 10 needed to access mentors.

Only two details are worth noting about the installation: The instructions call for installation of the android SDK, but it turned out that when installing the eclipse android plugin, the SDK was downloaded and installed right along with it. So you can skip the SDK step. The other point to note was that if you want to use the emulator you need to use the SDK manager to download a system image and then create a virtual device using the device manager. After that you are ready to roll.

Since the install was smooth and painless i moved on to the next step and quickly implemented the mockup in static html/css. i also tried to build the html from a function using jquery, but had no luck with that.

Why PhoneGap?

I have looked briefly at whats out there and somehow PhoneGap came to my attention. I watched some introductions and found that made a good case being all Free Software and supporting many platforms.

One great feature is that you can mix native and html views

Now they see it as allowing a transition from a native app to an html app, but i see also the reverse as ultimately we wanted to build native apps. This will allow us to do so without having to start from scratch. Instead we can focus on adding native code where it matters, where for example html is to limited to achieve a certain effect that we need or to slow. (It may turn out that we never need that, but it is good to have that option)

Also their stance of believing in the vision that all future mobile apps should be based on html and css and that they really want to make themselves irrelevant by expecting that eventually the browsers will pick up that functionality (so that all you need to deploy is html, css and js) is quite interesting. I am not necessarily agreeing with their idea of the future, but i certainly like their approach to it.

The phonegap guys even claim that they don't have competition.

Syndicated 2012-08-22 15:05:40 from DevLog

presenting nReduce at the beijing open party

Today's Open Party had a low turnout due to strong rain. Nonetheless it still had 11 talks in 4 tracks. Topics were Firefox OS, Geek Park, backbone.js conference report among others.

My presentation about nReduce gathered about half a dozend people. Given 3 competing talks and not more than 20-30 visitors overall this is actually quite a high turnout. They were also quite engaged and asked many questions. Maybe we'll get some more beijing teams when nReduce opens a new batch. One person was also interested in the email-task-manager.

nReduce is an online incubator. That is, the key benefits of joining an incubator: meeting other teams and sharing your experience, as well as talking to mentors, are brought online. Every team makes weekly goals and reports with short (less than 1 minute) videos. Teams group with other teams to work with and then discuss each others weekly progress. Our experience with nReduce was great from the start. Every week we received valuable feedback. A few times our check-in had the most discussion activity from all the teams we grouped with. Our progress is slow because we work on this only part-time for now, but we managed to come up with suitable goals that invited discussion.

We have now reached the halfway point and also reached a significant milestone for the email-task-manager. Until last week we were not clear whether we should start with a webinterface or focus on mobile clients first. The opinions were divided with me siding for the web. But one short comment by Hugh Mason clarified what we should do:

the folk who started with mobile first were forced to focus on the ONE really important feature of their product because of the small screen and the demand for instant gratification that mobile users show. That was really valuable. I'd always generally going for mobile first now if you plan on it being mobile ever

After reading that the goal was as clear as day. We absolutely have to start with mobile. There is no doubt about it now. We need to focus on the features that we can fit onto a mobile screen first, before expanding onto larger devices where we can use the space to add more features. It is also interesting to note that while we found related and competing products, none of those seem to focus on mobile.

Syndicated 2012-07-21 09:46:33 from DevLog