Julien Lecomte's Blog » Uncategorized

South Lake Tahoe

Julien Lecomte — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:40:59 +0000

gedit, An Awesome Text Editor

Julien Lecomte — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:02:57 +0000

TextMate has gained a lot of traction in the past few years, especially among web developers. Ruby developers swear by it for some reason. I don’t have MacOS X at home so I don’t use TextMate. Instead, my favorite text editor is gedit, the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. Unlike TextMate, gedit does not cost a thing, and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is extremely light weight and easily extensible via plugins, which can be written either in C or Python. On Ubuntu, the most popular plugins can be installed via the package gedit-plugins. Additional third party plugins can be downloaded here. Some of my favorite plugins include the following:

File browser pane
Find in documents
Draw spaces
Reopen tabs
Save without trailing space
Symbol browser
Tab converter

I also use the Darkmate theme for syntax highlighting. Finally, TextMate aficionados will enjoy this article explaining how to configure gedit to look and behave just like their editor of choice. Now, if you really insist on spending $64 (that’s how much a single user license for TextMate costs as the time of this writing), I would recommend you donate this amount to a charity of your choice. They really need it. Cheers!

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) First Impressions

Julien Lecomte — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:23:25 +0000

Last night, I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Release Candidate on my laptop (a HP dv2000 with a dual core AMD64 2.8GHz CPU and 2GB RAM) I had used Ubuntu in the past (versions 7.04 and 7.10) on that same machine, but finally turned to Windows Vista because my hardware was not very well supported on Linux (mainly my Broadcom wireless card) However, last night, I fell in love with Ubuntu all over again. The install went very smoothly, and everything worked right out of the box. I activated the proprietary drivers for both my video card and my wireless card, and voila! I was off and running in about 30 minutes. Awesome!

Happy New Year From Beautiful Rio de Janeiro

Julien Lecomte — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:29:10 +0000

I wish all of you a happy new year from beautiful Rio de Janeiro! I’m still enjoying a hot (95F) and humid weather before heading back to the US in a few days. May 2008 bring you happiness and success in all of your endeavors. Cheers!

What happened to Gmail?

Julien Lecomte — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:31:25 +0000

I have been using Gmail every since it first went public. I’ve always liked it for its simplicity, reliability and performance. When I read that the Gmail team had done some work to make their product even faster, I could not wait to get my hands on the new version. This morning, I was finally able to try it out and I was extremely disappointed. Firefox kept crashing, locking up, and the overall performance went down dramatically (in spite of disabling Firebug and turning the chat feature off.) I have read many such reports on other blogs, so I am wondering what the QA procedure is at Google. Maybe it’s time to put the “beta” back in Gmail, or roll back the previous version…

In the meantime, I’ll switch back to the good old Yahoo! Mail.

Update: Gmail is still in beta. For some reason, I thought they had passed that stage. My apologies for the misinformation.

Update: The Gmail developers kept a link to the older version (look at the links located at the top right of the page) Very wise decision indeed.

The New Yahoo! Search Has Finally Arrived!

Julien Lecomte — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:39:01 +0000

Yahoo! launched a new version of its search engine today. Until now, I was a Google user simply because Google’s results were a little bit more relevant, and also because it seemed a bit faster. However, the new Yahoo! Search has won me over. Here’s why:

First of all, the Yahoo! search page has been simplified to the extreme, which makes it load extremely fast. Second, the search page now has an auto-complete feature, similar to Google suggest. I had been waiting for this feature for a long time! Finally, Yahoo! has made huge improvements to the search results page, embedding rich media within search results, and adding an assistant to help you refine your search, and even explore related areas that you may not even have been aware existed! This is simply brilliant! Not only searching with Yahoo! quickly and efficiently leads you to what you were looking for, but it has also become a fun learning experience! Give it a try, and like me, you’ll quickly adopt it!

Below is a screenshot of a search for Nelly Furtado: