SILC
SILC here stands for Stuff I'd Like to Code (there's a pun here…) and is an experimental recurring article concept.
About three or four times a week I have the urge to code something (usually completely useless), so I launch vim and start typing some code. Then for some reason or another, I save the file, quit, and never open it again. Those reason are usually one of the following :
- WTF: The concept is awesome, but it's completely useless
- YAL: I'd have to use XXX in order to have easy bindings to YYY, and XXX would be yet another language to learn (where XXX might be perl and YYY some random library)
- Yawn: It's too easy
- Nike (just do it): I've resolved all the interesting problems, I know exactly what the code will look like, I just have to type it and debug, and that's boring
- 10pm: I've been coding for a few hours, it's late, and I still need a few hours to finish. The next day I won't even open the file again…
- N00b: It's just too difficult to implement
Anyway, I do this quite (too) often, so I thought I'd share.
[WTF] Javascript Lexer
One cool thing would be to implement a lexer framework in JavaScript using the awesome search and don't replace trick in order to catch tokens and store them in an array. It would run faster than the usual tokenizers (due to regex optimizations) and it would be more concise, I guess.
/* whatever */
});
[YAL] ncurses rss reader
My feed aggregator is Google Reader. It's fine, but there's a huge delay before a feed is updated. On the other hand, I read mail with mutt, go on IRC with irssi, write text using Vim and use pytone as a music player (any obvious pattern ?). So naturally, I'd like to have a curses based feed reader.
There are a few out there, but they have cluttered ui. I'd like something plain and simple : a togglable left sidebar for feeds/groups of feeds, and the articles ordered by date on the right. That's all. When selecting the article I'd like to have it piped through w3m to get a readable output, and have the ability to open the page in my browser. None of the feed readers I cited can do that, and it's a shame.
The natural reaction to such a frustration is I'll code it myself. There are good Python libraries to deal with RSS files, and a nice interface to ncurses. But then again, I'm no Python jedi master and dealing with ncurses is a curse. So I won't do it.
[10pm] HamlJS
Do you know haml? It's a really nice concept. However, there are only two implementations: in Ruby and PHP. A JavaScript implementation would be nice, and useful. But I got mixed up with the lexing, and spent a few hours on it, and then just went to sleep and never touched the source again.