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I wonder if they're good.

A question of loneliness

So, here's a story about a guy who decides to kill a bunch of women in a health club because he couldn't understand why women didn't like him. He hadn't slept with a woman for 19 years, and as he watched young couples in their 20s together every day, he felt desolation at the thought of living his life alone for the rest of his life. At the end of this desolation, he decided to kill himself, taking several others along with him. This is an extreme example of what a person might do once his loneliness consumes him, but for most people, loneliness occurs without them realizing it.

Loneliness happens when there's a lack of purpose in one's life, and as this void seeps into one's consciousness, it manifests itself into different symptoms-- for example, a deep feeling of boredom, an unexplainable desire for excitement, or something to do with friends (clubbing, dining, rafting, skydiving, or what have you). This social interaction masks and compensates for this void. That isn't to say that people who have friends are lonely, but rather, lonely people need friends because this social circle creates a sense of purpose and meaning in life. Afterall, what does the phrase, "have a life" mean? It is, in fact, referring to social life and the activities within. Friends, husbands, wives, dogs, cats, they're all included.

This sense of meaning goes deeper than one's driven purpose in life (i.e. why am I here?) as it fulfills its fundamental essence. In some of my evolutionary arguments, I often ask, "why do we have a face?" Did we "evolve" to have a face just because its convenient for our eyes to be right on top of our noses? No. This is why I'm a creationist, not an evolutionist. We have a face so it can be seen by others-- this is the purpose of one's face... i.e. a man exist not for himself, but so that others can see him.

Is it any surprise, then, that social networking like facebook, friendster, etc, on the internet have grown to the size that it has? These sites exist because people need them. They need them so they can tell their friends what they're doing, what they're feeling, what they're eating, what they're living. But why? Why do people need to broadcast to their friends what they're doing or whether they feel happy or sad? The answer is that they need to do this in order to validate their lives. For example, there is no point in winning the lottery if you're the only person that exists in this world.. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, then the tree might as well have never existed.

Understanding this is the beginning to the wisdom of faith. A person in whom God lives, is never lonely, because he is never without purpose.

"If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as one of its own. But because you do not belong to the world and I have chosen you out of it, the world hates you." - John 15:19

A great VI tutorial - part 1

It's hard to find really good content on the internet anymore as a lot of web sites are publishing whatever crap they can find to deliver advertisement in order to make a quick buck. A long time ago (waay back in 1996), I found a great VI tutorial that was indispensable reference material. I saved them on my hard drive, but I somehow lost it. Unbelievably, years later, I found them again. It's a 9-part tutorial that allows you to fully appreciate how powerful VI really is once you properly know how to use it. I thought I post them here for posterity so I don't lose them again. :)

Part 1: Vi Editor Fundamentals

By Walter Alan Zintz.

Why Vi?

A HEARTWARMING EDIT. Pity poor Hal, a corporate maintenance
programmer. A large module of badly- broken, poorly-patched
legacy code -- the spaghetti variety -- finally broke down
completely yesterday, leaving one corporate division running at
half speed. By dint of some inspired fixes during an all-nighter,
Hal has the module up and running again this morning...but just
as he's ready to go out for food that isn't from a vending
machine, in walks the corporation's VP of IS, with a big
surprise.

``Nice work on that crash fix, Hal; but right now I need some
formatted technical data about it, in a hurry. The Board of Directors'
Information Systems Committee has called a rush meeting this morning
to convince themselves they're on top of the problem. I'll be in
the hotseat, and I need technical data I can put up on the video
projector to keep them occupied.

``They'll want me to discuss the logfile of errors that led up
to the crash . . . yes, I know that's in /oltp/err/m7,
but appending puts the latest report lines at the bottom of the file.
Those suits aren't interested in what they think is ancient history,
and they wouldn't be caught reading anything but a commuter train
timetable from the bottom up,
so you'll have to make a copy with the order of the lines reversed:
what was the last line becomes the first line, what was the second
to the last line is now line number two, and so on.

``And let's take a look at that logfile.

374a12  44872  130295/074457  nonabort
5982d34  971  130295/221938  nonabort
853f7  2184  140295/102309  abort
...

Hmmm. Explaining the second column to them would be
advertising the fact that we knew this failure was just waiting
for a chance to happen. So while you're at it, go through and
erase all but the first and last digits of each number in column
two.

``Oh, and when they get tired of that they'll want to
scrutinize the Lint report. Last month I told them that our Lint
substitute was the greatest thing since Marilyn Monroe, so now
they'll want me to tell them why the messages it still generates
on this module aren't real hazards. Just run Lint over the
revamped module; then combine the Lint output with a copy of the
source file by taking each message line like:

Line 257: obsolete operator +=

and putting the significant part at the end of the source line it
refers to. And put a separator, like XXX, between
the source line and the message so I can page through quickly.
Nothing like a hefty dose of source code they can't begin to fathom
to make the meeting break up early.

``And get right on this. The meeting starts in 35 minutes.''

Our VP walks away inwardly smiling, thinking he's getting out
of detailed explanations and putting all the blame on an
underling, just by demanding more editing than anyone could do in
the time available. ``I'll tell the Information Systems
Committee that I made it perfectly clear to the programmer that
we needed this at 9:30, but when I asked him for it a minute ago
he said it wasn't finished and he wasn't sure when it would be.
Then I'll remark that those programmers just can't understand
that keeping management informed is every bit as important as
writing code!''

But Hal has a secret weapon against this squeeze play: an expert
knowledge of the Vi editor.

Reversing the order of the lines in a file is a piece of cake
with this editor. The eight keystrokes in:

:g/^/m0(ret)

will do it. Taking the digits out of the middle of the second column
throughout the file also requires just one command line:

:%s/^\([^ ]*  [0-9]\)[0-9]*\([0-9]  \)/\1\2(ret)

And integrating the Lint messages into a copy of the source
code? Even that can be automated with the Vi editor. The editor
command:

:%s/Line \([0-9][0-9]*\): \(.*\)/\1s;$; XXX \2(ret)

will turn that file of Lint messages into an editor script,
and running that script on a copy of the source file will mark it
up as requested.

Rather than being portrayed as a bungler, Hal can have it all
ready in a couple of minutes, just by typing a few lines. He'll
even have time to guard against vice-presidential prevarication,
by disappearing into the coffee shop across the street and
reappearing just as the meeting is getting started, to tell the
VP (and everyone else in earshot), ``Those files you wanted are
in slash-temp-slash-hal''.

THE PLAN OF THIS ONGOING TUTORIAL.

I'm writing here for editor users who have
some fluency in Vi/Ex at the surface level. That is, you know
how to do the ordinary things that are belabored in all the
``Introducing Vi'' books on the market, but rarely venture beyond
that level.

This tutorial series will explore a lot of other capabilities
that hardly anyone knows are in Vi/Ex. That includes quite a few
tricks that may be built on editor functions we all use every day,
but which nonetheless are not obvious -- for instance, telling the
global command to mark every line it encounters. I'll also be
clarifying the real nature of the many misunderstood aspects of
this editor.

To do all this, I'll be explaining things in more depth than
you might think warranted at first. I'll also throw in exercises
wherever they seem helpful. And to save you readers from gross
information overload, I'll write this tutorial in a large number
of fairly small modules, to be put up on our website at a calm,
reasonable pace.

The Editor's Basic Concepts

To get a real grasp on this editor's power, you need to know
the basic ideas embodied in it, and a few fundamental building
blocks that are used throughout its many functions.

One cause of editor misuse is that most users, even
experienced ones, don't really know what the editor is good at
and what it's not capable of. Here's a quick rundown on its
capabilities.

First, it's strictly a general-purpose editor. It doesn't
format the text; it doesn't have the handholding of a word
processor; it doesn't have built-in special facilities for
editing binaries, graphics, tables, outlines, or any programming
language except Lisp.

It's two editors in one. Visual mode is a better full-screen
editor than most, and it runs faster than those rivals that have
a larger bag of screen-editing commands. Line editing mode
dwarfs the ``global search and replace'' facilities found in word
processors and simple screen editors; its only rivals are
non-visual editors like Sed where you must know in advance exactly
what you want to do. But in the Vi/Ex editor, the two sides are
very closely linked, giving the editor a combination punch that
no other editor I've tried can rival.

Finally, this editor is at its best when used by people who
have taken the trouble to learn it thoroughly. It's too capable
to be learned well in an hour or two, and too idiosyncratic to be
mastered in a week, and yet the power really is in it, for the
few who care to delve into it. A large part of that power
requires custom-programming the editor: that's not easy or
straightforward, but what can be done by the skillful user goes
beyond the direct programmability of any editor except (possibly)
Emacs.

Search Patterns

In quite a few functions of this editor, you can use
string-pattern searching to say where something is to be done or
how far some effect is to extend. These search patterns are a
good example of an editor function that is very much in the Unix
style, but not exactly the same in detail as search patterns in
any other Unix utility.

Search patterns function in both line editing and visual
editing modes, and the work the same way in both, with just a few
exceptions. But how you tell the editor you're typing in a
search pattern will vary with the circumstances.

SEARCHING FROM WHERE YOU ARE NOW.

The more common use for search patterns is
to go to some new place in the file, or make some editing change
that will extend from your present position to the place the
pattern search finds. (In line editing mode it's also possible
to have an action take place from one pattern's location to where
another pattern is found, but both searches still start from your
present location.)

If you want to search forward in the file from your present
location (toward the end of the file), precede the search pattern
with a slash (/) character, and
type another to end the pattern. So if you want to move forward
to the next instance of the string ``j++'' in your file,
typing:

/j++/(ret)

will do it. And so will:

/j++(ret)

When there is nothing between the pattern and the RETURN key,
the RETURN itself will indicate the end of the search pattern, so
the second slash is not necessary. And if you are in visual
mode, the ESCAPE key works as well as RETURN does for ending
search input, so

/j++(esc)

is yet another way to make the same request from visual mode.

To search backward (toward the start of the
file), begin and end with a question mark instead of a slash.
The same rules of abbreviation apply to backward searches, so

?j++?(ret)
?j++(ret)
?j++(esc)

are all ways to head backward in the file to the same pattern.

Either way, you've expressed both your request for a pattern
search and the direction the search is to take in just one
keystroke. But don't assume that if you search backward, any
matching pattern the editor finds will be above your present
position in the file, and vice versa if you search forward. The
editor looks there first, certainly, but if it gets to the top or
bottom line of the file and hasn't found a match yet, it wraps
around to the other end of the file and continues the search in
the same direction. That is, if you used a question mark to
order a backward search and the editor searches all the way
through the top line of the file without finding a match, it will
go on to search the bottom line next, then the second-to-the-bottom
line, and so on until (if necessary) it gets back to the point
where the search started. Or if you were searching forward and
the editor found no match up through the very last line of the
file, it would next search the first line, then the second line,
etcetera.

If you don't want searches to go past either end of the file,
you'll need to type in a line mode command:

:set nowrapscan(ret)

This will disable the wraparound searching during the present
session in the editor. If you want to restore the wraparound
searching mechanism before you leave the editor, typing

:set wrapscan(ret)

will do it, and you can turn this on and off as often as you like.

THE FIND-THEM-ALL SEARCH.

Up to now, I've been considering searches
that find just one instance of the pattern; the one closest to
your current location in the file, in the direction you chose for
the search. But there is another style of search, used primarily
by certain line editing mode commands, such as
global and substitute. This search
finds every line in the file (or in a selected part of the file)
that contains the pattern and operates on them all.

Don't get confused when using the global and
substitute commands. You'll often use both styles of
search pattern in one command line. But the find-one-instance
pattern or patterns will go before the command name or abbreviation,
while the find-them-all pattern will come just behind it.
For example, in the command:

:?Chapter 10?,/The End/substitute/cat/dog/g(ret)

the first two patterns refer to the preceding line closest to
the current line that contains the string ``Chapter 10'' and the
closest following line containing the string ``The End''. Note
that each address finds only one line. Combined with the
intervening comma, they indicate that the substitute
command is to operate on those two lines and all the lines in
between them. But the patterns immediately after the
substitute command itself tell the command to find
every instance of the string ``cat'' withing that range of lines
and replace it with the string ``dog''.

Aside from the difference in meaning, the
two styles also have different standards for the delimiters that
mark pattern beginnings and (sometimes) endings. With a find-
them-all pattern, there's no need to indicate whether to search
forward or backward. Thus, you aren't limited to slash and
question mark as your pattern delimiters. Almost any punctuation
mark will do, because the editor takes note of the first
punctuation mark to appear after the command name, and regards it
as the delimiter in that instance. So

:?Chapter 10?,/The End/substitute;cat;dog;g(ret)
:?Chapter 10?,/The End/substitute+cat+dog+g(ret)
:?Chapter 10?,/The End/substitute{cat{dog{g(ret)

are all equivalent to the substitution command above. (It is
a good idea to avoid using punctuation characters that might have
a meaning in the command, such as an exclamation point, which
often appears as a switch at the end of a command name.)

The benefit of this liberty comes when
the slash mark will appear as itself in the search pattern. For
example, suppose our substitution command above was to find each
pair of consecutive slash marks in the text, and separate them
with a hyphen -- that is, change // to /-/.
Obviously,

:?Chapter 10?,/The End/substitute/////-//g(ret)

won't work; the command will only regard the first three slashes as
delimiters, and everything after that as extraneous characters at the
end of the command. This can be solved by backslashing:

:?Chapter 10?,/The End/substitute/\/\//\/-\//g(ret)

but this is even harder to type correctly than the first attempt was.
But with another punctuation mark as the separator

:?Chapter 10?,/The End/substitute;//;/-/;g(ret)

the typing is easy and the final command is readable.

SIMPLE SEARCH PATTERNS. The simplest search pattern is just a
string of characters you want the editor to find, exactly as
you've typed them in. For instance: ``the cat''. But, already
there are several caveats:

1. This search finds a string of characters, which may or may not
   be words by themselves. That is, it may find its target in the middle
   of the phrase ``we fed the cat boiled chicken'', or in
   the middle of ``we sailed a lithe catamaran down the coast''.
   It's all a matter of which it encounters first.
   
   
2. Whether the search calls ``The Cat'' a match or not depends
   on how you've set an editor variable named
   ignorecase. If you've left that variable in its
   default setting, the capitalized version will not match.
   If you want a capital letter to match its lower-case equivalent,
   and vice versa, type in the line mode command.
   
   

   :set ignorecase(ret)
   

   To resume letting caps match only caps and vice versa, type

   
   :set noignorecase(ret)
   

   
   
3. The search absolutely will not find a match where ``the''
   occurs at the end of one line and ``cat'' is at the start of the
   next line:
   

   
   and with Michael's careful help, we prodded the
   cat back into its cage.  Next afternoon several
   

   
   

   It makes no difference whether there is or isn't a space
   character between one of the words and the linebreak. Finding a
   pattern that may break across a line ending is a practically
   impossible task with this line-oriented editor.
   
   

4. Where the search starts depends on which editor mode you're using.
   A search in visual mode starts with the character next to the cursor.
   In line mode, the search starts with the line adjacent to the current
   line.
   
   

METACHARACTERS. Then there are search metacharacters or ``wild cards'':
characters that represent something other than themselves in the
search. As an example, the metacharacters . and
* in

/Then .ed paid me $50*!/(ret)

could cause the pattern to match any of:

Then Ted paid me $5!
Then Red paid me $5000!
Then Ned paid me $50!

or a myriad of other strings. Metacharacters are what give
search patterns their real power, but they need to be well
understood.

To understand these, you must know the varied uses of the
backslash (\) metacharacter in turning the ``wild
card'' value of metacharacters on and off.

In many cases, the meta value of the metacharacter is on
whenever the character appears in a search pattern unless it is
preceded by a backslash; when the backslash is ahead of it the
meta value is turned off and the character simply represents
itself. As an example, the backslash is a metacharacter by
itself, even if it precedes a character that never has a meta
value. The only way to put an actual backslash in your search
pattern is to precede it with another backslash to remove its
meta value. That is, to search for the pattern ``a\b'', type

/a\\b/(ret)

as your search pattern. If you type

/a\b/(ret)

the backslash will be interpreted as a metacharacter without
any effect (since the letter b is never a metacharacter) and your
search pattern will find the string ``ab''.

Less-often-used metacharacters are used in exactly the
opposite way. This sort of character represents only itself when
it appears by itself. You must use a preceding backslash to turn
the meta value on. For example, in

/\<cat/

the left angle bracket (<) is a metacharacter; in

/<cat/

it only represents itself. These special metacharacters are
pointed out in the list below.

Finally there is a third class, the most difficult to keep
track of. Usually these metacharacters have their meta values on
in search patterns, and must be backslashed to make them
represent just themselves: like our first example, the backslash
character itself. But if you've changed the default value of an
editor variable named magic to turn it off, they work
oppositely -- you then must backslash them to turn their meta value
on: like our second example, the left angle bracket. (Not that
you are are likely to have any reason to turn magic
off.) These oddities are also noted in the list below.

And don't forget the punctuation
character that starts and ends your search pattern, whether
it is slash or question mark or something else. Whatever it is,
if it is also to appear as a character in the pattern you are
searching for, you'll have to backslash it there to prevent the
editor thinking it is the end of the pattern.

TABLE OF SEARCH PATTERN METACHARACTERS

.

A period in a search pattern matches any single character,
whether a letter of the alphabet (upper or lower case), a digit,
a punctuation mark, in fact, any ASCII character except the
newline. So to find ``default value'' when it might be spelled
``default-value'' or ``default/value'' or ``default_value'',
etcetera, use /default.value/ as
your search pattern. When the editor variable magic
is turned off, you must backslash the period to give it its meta
value.

*

An asterisk, plus the character that precedes it, match any
length string (even zero length) of the character that precedes
the asterisk. So the search string
/ab*c/ would match ``ac'' or
``abc'' or ``abbc'' or ``abbbc'', and so on. (To find a string
with at least one ``b'' in it, use
/abb*c/ as your search string.)
When the asterisk follows another metacharacter, the two match
any length string of characters that the metacharacter matches.
That means that /a.*b/ will find
``a'' followed by ``b'' with anything (or nothing) between them.
When the editor variable magic is turned off, you must
backslash the asterisk to give it its meta value.

^

A circumflex as the first character in a search pattern means
that a match will be found only if the matching string occurs at
the start of a line of text. It doesn't represent any character
at the start of the line, of course, and a circumflex anywhere in
a search pattern except as the first character will have no meta
value. So /^cat/ will find
``cat'', but only at the start of a line, while
/cat^/ will find ``cat^'' anywhere
in a line.

$

A dollar sign as the last character in a search pattern means
the match must occur at the end of a line of text. Otherwise
it's the same as circumflex, above.

\<

At the start of a search pattern, a backslashed left-angle
bracket means the match can only occur at the start of a simple
word; at any other position in a search pattern it is not a
metacharacter. (In this editor, a ``simple'' word is either a
string of one or more alphanumeric character(s) or a string of
one or more non-alphanumeric, non-whitespace character(s), so
``shouldn't'' contains three simple words.) Thus
/\<cat/ will find the last three
characters in ``the cat'' or in ``tom-cat'', but not in
``tomcat''. To remove the meta value from the left angle bracket,
remove the preceding backslash:
/<cat/ will find ``<cat''
regardless of what precedes it.

\>

At the end of a search pattern, a backslashed right angle
bracket means the match can occur only at the end of a simple
word. Otherwise the same as the left angle bracket, above.

~

The tilde represents the last string you put into a line by
means of a line mode substitute command, regardless
of whether you were in line mode then or ran it from visual mode
by preceding it with a colon
(``:''). For instance, if your last
line mode substitution command was
s/dog/cat/ then a
/the ~/ search pattern will find
``the cat''. But the input string of a substitute
command can use metacharacters of its own, and if your last use
involved any of those metacharacters then a tilde in your search
pattern will give you either an error message or a match that is
not what you expected. When the editor variable magic
is turned off, you must backslash the tilde to give it its meta
value.

CHARACTER CLASSES. There is one metastring form (a
``multicharacter metacharacter'') used in search patterns. When
several characters are enclosed within a set of brackets
([]), the group matches any one
of the characters inside the brackets. That is,
/part [123]/ will match ``part 1'',
``part 2'' or ``part 3'', whichever the search comes to first.
One frequent use for this feature is in finding a string that may
or may not be capitalized, when the editor variable
ignorecase is turned off (as it is by default). Typing
/[Cc]at/ will find either ``Cat''
or ``cat'', and /[Cc][Aa][Tt]/ will
find those or ``CAT''. (In case there was a slip of the shift key
when ``CAT'' was typed in, the last pattern will even find
``CaT'', ``CAt'', etcetera.)

There's more power (and some complication) in another feature
of this metastring: there can be metacharacters inside it.
Inside the brackets, a circumflex as the first character reverses
the meaning. Now the metastring matches any one character that
is NOT within the brackets. A /^[^ ]/
search pattern finds a line that does not begin with a space character.
(You're so right if you think that the different meta values of the
circumflex inside and outside the character class brackets is not
one of the editor's best points.) A circumflex that is not the
first character inside the brackets represents just an actual
circumflex.

A hyphen can be a metacharacter within the brackets, too.
When it's between two characters, and the first of the two other
characters has a lower ASCII value than the second, it's as if
you'd typed in all of the characters in the ASCII
collating sequence from the first to the second one,
inclusive. So /[0-9]%/ will find
any numeral followed by the percent sign (%), just
as /[0123456789]%/ would. A
/[a-z]/ search pattern will match
any lower-case letter, and /[a-zA-Z]/
matches any letter, capital or lower case. These two internal
metacharacters can be combined: /[^A-Z]/
will find any character except a capital letter. A hyphen that
is either the first or the last character inside the brackets has
no meta value. When a character-hyphen-character string has a
first character with a higher ASCII value than the last
character, the hyphen and the two characters that surround it are
all ignored by the pattern search, so
/[ABz-a]/ is the same as
/[AB]/.

Backslashing character classes is complex. Within the
brackets you must backslash a right bracket that's part of the
class; otherwise the editor will mistake it for the bracket that
closes the class. Of course you must backslash a backslash that
you want to be part of the class, and you can backslash a
circumflex at the start or a hyphen between two characters if you
want them in the class literally and don't want to move them
elsewhere in the construct. Elsewhere in a search pattern you
will have to backslash a left bracket that you want to appear as
itself, or else the editor will take it as your attempt to begin
a character class. Finally, if magic is turned off,
you'll have to backslash a left bracket when you do want it to
begin a character class.