nat

Shouldn't the conclusion here be "make friends with people that own Panasonic m4/3rds or nice dSLRs"? None of their example photos look like self portraits.

Agreed. I was really surprised with how odd vim-latex felt. In my experience, most of these language-specific vim plugins stay pretty light, enhancing built-in vim behavior to perform in the expected way given a particular language's peculiarities. Instead, it tries to build up this complex system of macros and shortcuts that added a really thick layer on top of actually writing LaTeX (a process that I actually quite enjoy). Maybe it's another one of those things that I have to see in use to appreciate, and I'm sure there's some really useful stuff in there, but it just didn't seem worth it.

I disagree with that quote he throws out at the end there about A/B testing not being able to construct things. Isn't that essentially what genetic algorithms do? Granted, we don't use that sort of process to make a website because it would be slightly insane, but who knows?

And even starting from one sub-optimal site, isn't arriving at some better, more refined experience a form of construction? If you're not discovering something unexpected or seeing something new form from A/B testing, I think that speaks more to your lack of imagination or unwillingness to try than it does some inherent limitation of testing.

Yeah, sorry about that, I guess that would have made my comment a little less worthless. My interpretation of that clause includes tools such as this, and though it is hardly some gross violation, I do find it amusing.

I know Selenium RC does the same thing in sample scripts for some of its bindings, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it in other tools as well.

Look at that, yet another browser automation tool that violates Google's TOS in its demo.

These sort of lists always kind of amaze me. I don't think I use 10 mac apps total. Chrome, iTerm, Mail, iCal, Adium, Twitterrific, iTunes, uh...Unix? I guess that last one is kind of a multi-parter, but still.

Are the apps in the article addressing problems that don't really exist, or will I just put up with anything?

It sounds to me like you might be taking the wrong lesson away from this. Try finding the five things most precious to you and throwing away everything else.

Being affected by the loss of a spoon shouldn't make you want to never love a spoon again (that way lies crappy romantic comedies). The idea here is to concentrate our attachment to objects, not eliminate it.

He's written articles pretty similar to this before, and I think in the last one, he did mention the the Cambridge Grammar. Half the comments were people jumping down his throat for having a conflict of interest.

http://bitbucket.org/natw/dotfiles/src/tip/.vimrc

some parts I haven't seen mentioned otherwise:

  set statusline=[TYPE=%Y]\ [ENC=%{&fenc}]\ [ASCII=\%03.3b]\ [HEX=\%02.2B]\ [POS=%04l,%04v][%p%%]
  hi StatusLine term=bold,reverse cterm=bold ctermfg=7 ctermbg=0
  hi StatusLineNC term=reverse cterm=bold ctermfg=8

gives me a nice status bar with some good info

  set t_Co=256
  colorscheme railscasts

best color scheme I've found yet, and I don't know how I lived before 256 colors

  set noerrorbells
  set novisualbell
  set t_vb=

This might be redundant, but I hate error bells SO MUCH. This might be even more important than "set nocompatible".

  map ^P :set paste!<CR>:set paste?<CR>

in python mode at least, autoindent will usually mess up pasted text

Plus the usual 4 space soft tab, autoindent stuff. I also highly suggest keeping your dotfiles in some kind of version control. It is definitely fun to see them grow, and I can't imagine working on multiple systems without it.

like some kind of irritating Three Musketeers

I might feel the same way if I didn't buy a Kindle specifically so people on the train couldn't see what I was reading.

Not out of any kind of principle or anything, I just don't want people knowing that every book I read has a dragon or a spaceship on the cover.

Just a thought, but some of their appeal might lie not so much in the food, but rather the smokin' hot nurses they appear to have working there.

He wrote a follow-up entry on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1319 It's mostly a response to the comments on Fark, so understandably he's a little bitter. Still, he does recommend an alternative: Joseph Williams' Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.