So, I've started creating a new theme for this blog. It's pretty simple, and knowing me, I'll change it up a lot as time goes by, but it works for now. Forgive some ugly / broken stuff as I sift through all the CSS / PHP and make the necessary changes. I really do like how simple it is to create / augment Wordpress themes. The system is very intuitive, and you can scale from a small blog to a decent-sized multi-user site easily. Plus, the plugin system is quite developer-friendly. You can't create the level of customization you can achieve with a real web framework, but it's fun for baby sites. :) Anyway, the other part of this evening was spent grabbing the new Ubuntu Desktop Beta (9.10). Originally, I could not get any of the Live CDs to work, and I was about to post a mean bug report when I noticed that I was getting strange RAM reporting on boot up. Lo and behold, after running a memory diagnostic, it turns out one of my sticks went bad. Darn you, cheap power supply! Pulled it out, and within twenty minutes I was rocking a new, 64-bit beta distro. There is a Koala in my computer now. Anyway, if you want to run 64bit Linux, and you happen to frequent tiny sites like YouTube, Vimeo, ON Networks, and Hulu, then you probably will want the Flash plugin. You can wrap the libraries in ndiswrapper, sure to provide hours of fun, or you can just grab Adobe's 64-bit beta Flash 10 player from here. After that, just copy it into your Firefox directory: [sourcecode language="sh"] tar xvzf libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz sudo cp -r libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ [/sourcecode] 64-bit Ubuntu is really quick, by the way. I have enjoyed just pummeling the system (made better by the fact that I already reduced the amount of RAM!) and watching it yawn at me.

Okay, we all know vim is the best IDE out there. But what is a fella to do when he wants to use the best IDE with the best closed-source vector-based browser plugin scripting language? Why, hack at his vim install! :) First, download the actionscript.vim file from this place. The actionscript.vim file is a syntax file, so it should go in the appropriate folder as you see fit. However, note that in OS X the .vim folder seems to have no impact, so you have to put it in the /usr/share/vim/vim72/syntax folder. (Use sudo, and you may need to use a different vim folder if it has a newer version.) Next, we have to hack at the filetype.vim file in the /usr/share/vim* folder in order to disable the default treatment of *.as files. Change the lines that say: [sourcecode language="sh"] " Atlas au BufNewFile,BufRead *.atl,*as setf atlas [/sourcecode] ...into the following series of lines: [sourcecode language="sh"] " Atlas au BufNewFile,BufRead *.atl setf atlas " ActionScript au BufNewFile,BufRead *.as setf actionscript [/sourcecode] Voila! Opening .as files in vim should work now.