February 2012
1 post
“You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new...”
– The Technium: Techno Life Skills
Everything I believe. Rediscovered in the Snarkmarket archives.
(via dianakimball)
January 2012
2 posts
Google's new privacy policy and the Spongebob... →
By the smart Casey Johnston.
caseyj:
What I didn’t say in the above article, but wanted to, is that Google and its new privacy policy that will let Google log and store data on everything you do with their services reminds me of the Spongebob Squarepants Movie. Stay with me.
In the movie, Plankton, the unquestionably evil character, gets ahold of the Krabby Patty’s cherished burger recipe,...
Postcards from Space: Why Black March Is a Really... →
postcardsfromspace:
To the people proposing this:
You dumb bastards. You know who this’ll hurt? Not big media. Not on any significant scale.
No, the people this will really fuck over are the EXACT same people SOPA and PIPA would fuck: Creative professionals; small publishers; independent businesses.
If you…
December 2011
7 posts
4 tags
Using Vim and Exuberant CTags for easy source...
I know many people who live and die with some of these shiny IDEs: nice fully-featured software to manage software projects. Design, code, compile, run, debug. Me, I distrust these great magnificient beasts. The good ones I’ve heard of work best when targetting certain platforms and languages, such as Xcode (for Mac and iOS software written mainly in Objective C), Eclipse (for Java software)...
4 tags
More shell, less egg - All this →
Having just fallen in love with literate programming, I stumble on this hilarious piece. Not so sobering as just a reminder that not every problem is a nail. As I said earlier, literate programming is a tool to manage the complexity of a problem solved in software. However, when the solution is expressed concisely in a certain language or toolkit, it is thus a simple problem in this perspective....
1 tag
Example of Literate Programming in HTML →
I will look like a complete Philistine, but this piece is my first serious exposition to literate programming. The times I had heard about this approach to software development, it had been derided as academical, unpragmatic and impractical — something that was of interest only to its pioneer, Donald Knuth. That that I can see it for myself, I think the ideas behind literate programming are...
4 tags
VimLinkNotes: a personal wiki using Vim and ctags
I have hacked together a simple personal wiki implementation in Vim, with the help of Exuberant ctags. I think the full implementation holds in less than 50 lines of configuration and Vim script code. Feel free to take a look at the project page. For the impatient, I might as well point to the GitHub page.
4 tags
Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing →
I am a member of the Vim cult. We hold no meetings, we don’t always know each other, we don’t all mock Emacs (at least I don’t), we just share an unlikely love for this lean and efficient text editor. Vim is like a good dog, it follows you everywhere you code, your faithful companion.
However, like a good dog, Vim requires some taming, some domestication (actually, Vim tames...
5 tags
Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career... →
Very honest piece. As a software developer of any walk or flavor, you work a market, so you have to sell something, to offer some value to someone. Making yourself hireable entails making this value explicit. So shine away.
Here’s a good quote out of the article that has prompted some bitter responses:
You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back...
4 tags
Ergonomics for programmers: the importance of a...
Scotch tape fetish
Back when I was working for my Ph.D., there was this post-doc in our lab who had this funny habit. He had this big roll of scotch tape by his computer screen. Every morning, as he sat down for work, he tore off a good length of that tape to bind his left-hand ring and pinky fingers together.
“Is this some kind of fetish?”, I asked on a slow day. “No,...
November 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Twelve Views of Mark Jason Dominus →
Sorry for the long hiatus, dear reader, the last many days have been crazy at the job.
These are notes for a presentation by Perl guru Mark Jason Dominus, the author of Higher-Order Perl, among other things. From these many wisdom nuggets, here’s a few ideas I retain.
As said Vonnegut, “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” Really, it’s not so hard, even I am up to...
Two decades of productivity: Vim's 20th... →
I’ve been a Vim user for almost 15 years, now. Vim is my one true companion while programming: it has taken me through undergrad CS and grade school, home projects, school projects, research projects, article writing, thesis writing, desperate attempts at system administration and so, so much random noodling. With Vim, I have succeeded and I have failed. In spite of my Ph.D. advisors best...
4 tags
Online abuse against female writers: more feminism... →
Sorry for the thematic disruption, but this is important. Also, sorry about the exclusivity of this rant. Abuse online is disgusting in any and all cases. However, I am personnally moved to action about issues of woman equality and feminism. What is at stake here is not disagreement or dissension to points, ideas or even personalities in online discussion: these can be dealt with, even when they...
October 2011
7 posts
2 tags
Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than →
I wrote a typing tester in Turbo Pascal when I was a kid! Lovely memories of learning the mysteries of pointers. And linked lists. I’ll just fire up my qbasic to wipe off the nostalgia. (No I won’t, it’s bedtime. I’m not 16 anymore.)
Why Functional Programming Matters →
Way back when in undergrad CS, I had been fascinated with functional programming. The teacher was reviled by everyone but me, because each lesson would put many more questions into your head than it did answer. I am not a very intelligent guy: I get by on sheer perseverance and putting in the work, and although I have good memory and a knack for explaining things, I get few good ideas. In the past...
The Mythical Man-Month →
(via Instapaper)
This is not Fred Brooks’ seminal book, but it riffs along similar lines.
The highlight of this insider view of a Google engineer is his perspective on the effects of team size. “People need small wins to thrive, and large teams are poisonous to small wins.” Indeed, working in a small team has brought me a great sequence of small wins, gems of professional...
3 tags
Researchers create stealth virtual machine that... →
(via Instapaper)
I have been using virtualization since starting up on the job with Arcadia, and I am not going back. I love that machine state can be saved for archiving, reuse or packaged as a product.
The piece I link to here presents a virtualization implementation that makes the virtual machine run in a stealthy fashion with respect to the host machine and other VMs. The tech is...
3 tags
Our Posthumous Footprint [USA Science and... →
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A good piece from Dr. Joe Schwarcz, the author of the book Brain Fuel I have reviewed last year (in French). He is another great scientific writer, focused on subjects of chemistry (his own field), often as to how it affects biology, physiology and health. Always an easy, interesting to read.
In this piece, Dr. Schwarcz talk about a new approach to disposing of one’s...
Why does the Earth have a liquid core? [Starts... →
(via Instapaper)
Ethan Siegel does the best physics vulgarization column. He’s getting up there with Hubert Reeves, a wizened and passionate and thought-provoking Canadian teacher and public speaker.
The piece linked here discusses the fascinating processes behind planetary structure, surface formation and earthquakes.
4 tags
Text processing one-liners: Ruby vs. Awk
Since my review of a book about Awk, I’ve been thinking a lot about text processing in the Unix stream-oriented workflow. Before learning Awk, I used Sed for easy text substitution stuff, yet my go-to language for text processing was Ruby: I have written many small programs that simply iterate over each lines of a stream, processing. However, hailing from Perl, which hailed from Awk, Ruby is...
September 2011
6 posts
3 tags
A Brief History of the Brain →
(via Instapaper)
The idea that interested me most in this piece is the trade-off between the advantages of better cognitive power and its energy cost. So many organisms get by just fine without a central nervous system, using lower-tech chemical or electrical exchanges — the plasmids and biofilm web of bacteria colonies come to mind. Central neuronic hubs, of which the brain is the...
3 tags
Agile Focus » Blog Archive » Agile’s Second... →
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Since I have read Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained, I have done all I could to integrate agile approaches to software development in my own work. I started out with simple things, such as TDD, which has helped tremendously with making my projects easier to maintain. With TDD projects, I am never scared of rewriting whole parts of some project in an attempt to...
4 tags
Happy Nerds - Programming Links for Kids →
I love programming as a hobby as much as a professional activity, and I remember I got into it when I was quite young. My first contact was with the ugly macro language of Lotus 1-2-3: there were nerds, and then there was silly me. Anyway, now I’ve got sons that are 5 and 3 years old, and I really want to share my passion for programming as soon as they can make some sense of the keyboard,...
Who Discovered The Earth is Round? [Starts With A... →
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4 tags
Review of "Awk One-Liners Explained," by Peteris...
A history lesson
As a target for writing code, the UNIX software ecosystem is strangely fascinating. Among its features, one standout is its reliance on text as a basic information storage unit. This sentence looks dumb out of context, because of course. But in the age of rich media and omnipresent design, the simplicity of carrying information on text alone is refreshing, comforting in its...
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