Google has started rolling out chat features directly in the Gmail webmail interface. You can (optionally) archive all of your google talk conversations, and will soon be able to chat on the google talk jabber network from the web interface. Kinda neat... Are they trying to merge the worlds of email and IM?

Not long ago, I found out about vimdiff. Basically, vim will open two files with a vertical split and highlight differences between them. You can navigate through the files and use :diffput and :diffget to synchronize blocks of the file. My programming life doesn't involve patches and version control and all that, but it is still an invaluable tool.

One place I've found it particularly useful is when upgrading ebuilds in gentoo. If your new package has a new config file in /etc, portage will not overwrite your current config, but will put the new file next to it. For example, an update to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf would be placed at /etc/apache2/._cfg0000_httpd.conf. For non-trivial updates (where etc-update/dispatch-conf aren't really practical), it's nice to be able to see the two versions side-by-side and update blocks at a time where needed.

So, not a tool I use everyday, but one that I'm very glad to have discovered. Check out the docs.

This is so weird.... Every day when I wake up, it's always Groundhog Day. Every day is the same... Phil always sees his shadow. Will winter never end?

How can I escape this repetitive existence?

My current job title is "Web Developer." I develop web applications, and I generally enjoy it quite a bit. But the applications that I work with on a daily basis tend to include forms. Yuck. We have talked about it time and again in the office, and I have scoured the web for an elegent way to deal with them.

We've tried Pear's QuickForm package, and it's okay for simple forms, but having full control over each element just isn't possible. QuickForm takes the approch of generating the markup and adding validation rules with php code. That is you never write html when creating such a form, it does it for you. Sometimes you really just need to write you own markup.

A while back I came across this article that outlined a pretty neat way to deal with it. I really like the idea of including the rules in the markup and have php use those rules to validate the form. This particular implemenation adds a bunch of tags and elements in the html, which just doesn't sit right with me.

So what if we could use completely standard markup, yet still include these validation rules in it. If only there was a language that described forms this richly... Enter XForms. XForms has all that built in. What if we could write an XForm, have php (or your language of choice) parse it AND use the built in rules to validate it on submit? For now, we'd have to have php spit out old-style html forms that correspond to the structure in the XForm... but we'd be ready for the future, and someday we'd be able to take out that part and just send the XForm.

I think I'll familiarize myself a bit more with the XForms recomendations and outline a library to do this. Thoughts?