The No Title^® Tech Blog

You may wonder how I came up with this topic. I usually code in a graphical IDE like PyCharm or Visual Studio, or even a text editor like VS Code or BBEdit. But sometimes you need some lightweight application that is capable of opening and efficiently edit a file. I often return to VIM for quick edits in small files. Sometimes, just for the convenience of not leaving the shell. Other times, because it’s a powerful editor that runs perfectly under a SSH connection. And a few days ago, it was the only application I had installed on Windows which would let me open, navigate and read a several GB heavy text file without complaining.

If you’re a developer or a systems administrator, sooner or later you will meet that HUUUGE, GIANT, ENORMOUS file. A file that weights several gigabytes of more or less cryptic system or application logging messages, with no rotation scheme in place. Since log files are usually built by appending the most recent information to the end, probably you just need to check out the last 100 or 1000 lines, in order to find out why an application has crashed or failed to operate properly some seconds or a minute ago. Turns out that reading such huge files may not be as simple as editing them in Notepad. Probably, an application like that won’t even be able to the file. So, what else can you do?

After about 20 months of hard work, the Haiku team has finally released, a few days ago, the second beta version of Haiku, the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system that aims to offer a fast, simple to use, and powerful alternative for personal computing. This time, I am particularly happy, even a bit proud myself, because I have also been contributing with Portuguese translations for the user interface, and this is the first beta which includes those translations. So, let’s celebrate!

This is the tutorial I wish I had around some years ago, when I first tried to learn how to use Vim. If you’re just beginning to know this amazing text editor, please keep reading, I am writing this tutorial right for you!

Do you know that nice feeling that comes from getting a mission accomplished? There is nothing like watching some of our work come to life.

Since two weeks ago, I have been back to the Haiku world, exploring the present status of the operating system and currently available tools, and I decided to start using Haiku to translate the Haiku operating system to Portuguese.

Having experimented and used BeOS R5 Pro back in the early 2000’s, when the company that created it was just going down, I have been following with some interest the development of Haiku during all these years. While one can argue that both the old BeOS and Haiku miss some important features to be considered modern OSes these days, the fact is that a lightweight operating system can always be, for instance, an excellent way to bring new life into old, or new but less powerfull, hardware.