The programmer hierarchy
Tuesday, December 26, 2006, 03:39 PM - Apt-get Install
38 comments Where's My Google PC?
Friday, July 7, 2006, 11:47 AM - Apt-get Install
Paul Boutin talks about Google PC and the OS market in Slate:
Unless you're playing Grand Theft Auto or watching HDTV, your network isn't the slowest part of your setup. It's the consumer-grade Pentium and disk drive on your Dell, and the wimpy home data bus that connects them. Home computers are marketed with slogans like "Ultimate Performance," but the truth is they're engineered to run cool, quiet, and slow compared to commercial servers. Google's Web search is blindingly fast because your requests get handled by a sprawling array of loud, hot, power-hungry server racks that you'd never allow in your house. All your home computer has to do is draw the results of Google's massive data-mining process on its screen- that's the easy part.
Read the article
Why we all sell code with bugs
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 10:59 PM - Apt-get Install
Eric Sink in The Guardian
The world's six billion people can be divided into two groups: group one, who know why every good software company ships products with known bugs; and group two, who don't. Those in group 1 tend to forget what life was like before our youthful optimism was spoiled by reality. Sometimes we encounter a person in group two, a new hire on the team or a customer, who is shocked that any software company would ship a product before every last bug is fixed.
Every time Microsoft releases a version of Windows, stories are written about how the open bug count is a five-digit number. People in group two find that interesting. But if you are a software developer, you need to get into group one, where I am. Why would an independent software vendor - like SourceGear - release a product with known bugs? There are several reasons:
· We care about quality so deeply that we know how to decide which bugs are acceptable and which ones are not.
· It is better to ship a product with a known quality level than to ship a product full of surprises.
· The alternative is to fix them and risk introducing worse bugs.
Sure. May I add: because every time you fix your own bugs you can sell the product again. Or sell the patches.
Wireless Freedom
Wednesday, April 19, 2006, 10:16 PM - Apt-get Install
OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for wireless routers. Instead of trying to cram every possible feature into one firmware, OpenWrt provides only a minimal firmware with support for add-on packages. For users this means the ability to custom tune features, removing unwanted packages to make room for other packages and for developers this means being able to focus on packages without having to test and release an entire firmware.
Link to site
Link to docs
Word files in the command line
Wednesday, March 1, 2006, 02:33 PM - Apt-get Install
Antiword is a nifty application that can convert Word documents to plain text, PostScript, and PDF. According to the developer, conversion to DocBook XML is still experimental and doesn't always work well.
Antiword is very flexible. It can read and convert files created with Word versions 2.0 to 2003, and you can run it on multiple operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, RISC OS, FreeBSD, and OpenVMS. On top of that, you can set the paper size for documents converted to PostScript or PDF, include any text that was removed from the file (but which Word notoriously keeps a record of), and display any hidden text.
For the most part, you'll just want to view a Word document. To do that, you just have to type the following command:
antiword file.doc
The Word document will be converted to text and printed to the screen. If you're running Antiword in a terminal window, you'll have to scroll up to view the full text of the document. To get around this, you can pipe the output from Antiword to the less utility, which will allow you to scroll through the document page by page from the top:
antiword file.doc | less
Antiword
article in Linux.com
The Texturize plugin for GIMP
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:15 PM - Apt-get Install
Textures are probably one of the most undervalued elements in 3D modelling. That's why, among other reasons, this plugin is so awsome:
Imagine that you have an image with a small sample of a texture, like a few strawberries (out of a plate full of them), a few square inches of grass (from a large grassy field), or a few dozens of your cat's hairs (your cat really has more than that). If you want to generate a larger texture with this small image, you could just copy-paste it, and put the copies (or "patches") one next to another, but that wouldn't produce a very good result, since the right (or top) part of the image usually doesn't correspond to its left (or bottom) part, when two copies of the image are assembled.
The Texturize plugin allows you to get all the strawberries, the whole grass field, or your whole cat (well, it doesn't guess you cat's shape, but you can at least get a lot of his hairs!). Moreover, Texturize lets you actually create tileable textures (which is great for game design). Have a look at the examples section to see what it looks like
The Texturize plugin is available under the GPL license and is multiplatform. Blink!
Understanding UNIX/Linux file system (I)
Friday, January 20, 2006, 08:45 PM - Apt-get Install
A conceptual understanding of file system, especially data structure and related terms will help you become a successful system administrator. I have seen many new Linux system administrator w/o any clue about file system. The conceptual knowledge can be applied to restore file system in an emergency situation.
There we go then
via Adminspotting
Next
