I was reading this article, on LWN, about “DTrace envy”. The short of the article is that, despite great efforts, the DTrace “ecosystem” of tools has yet to be replicated on Linux. Forgetting the technical considerations for a minute, it might be worth your time to read through the comments at what appears to be a partial example of what I term “political argument”.
When licensing != messaging
August 19th, 2008AOP: YARBI
August 19th, 2008I just watched a talk about AOP given by some guy from PARC (Gregor Kiczales), and I have to say the following:
Before I watched this talk, I thought AOP was just another bad idea. After watching this talk, I realize that AOP is Yet Another Really Bad Idea. Either that or this guy is just a few steps away from needing a nurse to cut up his food.
Dealers of Lightning
July 27th, 2008First off, go buy this book. It isn’t new or anything (published in 2000), so I’m not quite sure why the local Borders was randomnly stocking four copies of it, but holy jebus am I glad I found it.
popular == authoritarian??
July 25th, 2008I just read this article on Media Matters about a interview between Glenn Beck of CNN and Ben Stein. Ben Stein has been kinda on the crazy side recently, with the whole Expelled (documentary) thing.
(quick shortcut) pasting into a windows command prompt
July 25th, 2008My coworker Michael uses this one, which I’ve found saves me a bit of time and a headache. Normally, to paste into a command prompt, you have to right-click on the command prompt; this is well and good if you have your hand on the mouse already, but annoying if you have your hands on the keyboard. Instead, try the following:
- Alt+spacebar (activates the window menu)
- E (for the “Edit” menu)
- P (for “Paste”)
It is a little bit awkward at first, but as it becomes muscle memory, you’ll find it much faster than moving your hand to the mouse and back.
the keyboard/mouse and “bandwidth”
July 25th, 2008I want to clarify something of what I wrote in the last post about when the keyboard is more effective than the mouse and how it relates to bandwidth. If you haven’t already read the post on The Productive Programmer and vim, go do so, then come back.
The Productive Programmer and vim
July 24th, 2008I started reading The Productive Programmer today, and I’ve already, in the first 15 pages or so (including introduction), found some interesting tidbits worth sharing.
How to convince people you have no clue what you are talking about
June 13th, 2008(Rules taken from an email thread I’m reading right now).
The email thread was trying to ascertain if there are effectively things equivalent to Apple Keychain on Linux. Here’s how my favorite response went:
freeing memory on exit
May 22nd, 2008Back when I was a TA, I found that a few people had a very curious misconception. In C++, they thought, if you never deleted an object, that object would never ever get freed until you restarted your computer. Basically, that a memory leak is memory that is lost and gone forever (for all intents and purposes).
Getting over the hump
May 21st, 2008Almost every person I work with has some type of programming project they work on at home. Michael (last I checked) is writing a synthesizer to go along with the midi controller keyboard he now owns, Matthew is writing an application so that he can update his music library’s metadata more easily, and other people have other tiny projects that they work on when the go home at night.
Me? I watch southpark until I fall asleep.
Some days, I wonder if something is wrong with me. Like I’m a bad geek for not programming when I go home. Hell, my own brother puts most of us to shame, having started what (I think) is the most popular linux PVR project in existence, MythTV.
So what’s wrong with me?