The Unix ecosystem, in many ways, constitutes a person’s toolbox for hacking away at all sorts of problems, including programming or email or browsing. Topics about the toolbox and about sharpening the saw.
The Unix ecosystem, in many ways, constitutes a person’s toolbox for hacking away at all sorts of problems, including programming or email or browsing. Topics about the toolbox and about sharpening the saw.
This post is not meant as a rag on Darcs, just a observation of the difference between two philosophies of version control. Also, I’m a bit new to Darcs, so there might be some factual inaccuracies. Please let me know about them! At some point, I would like to write a Darcs for Git users [...]
Some things come round full circle. As a high schooler, I was a real Windows enthusiast. A budding programmer, I accumulated a complete development environment out of necessity, a mix of Cygwin, handwritten batch scripts, PuTTY, LogMeIn, a homegrown set of PHP build scripts and Notepad++. I was so devoted to the cause I even [...]
A little trick for your toolbox: after you’ve generated your slide deck and printed it out to PDF, you might want to annotate the slides with comments. These is a good idea for several reasons: If you’ve constructed your slides to be text light, they might be optimized for presentation but not for reading later [...]
Now that term is over, I finally went an upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Lucid Lynx. The process went substantially more smoothly than Karmic went, but there were still a few hiccups. Etckeeper. As always, you should set AVOID_COMMIT_BEFORE_INSTALL to 0 before attempting a release upgrade, since etckeeper hooks will be invoked multiple [...]
Two people have asked me how drew the diagrams for my previous post You Could Have Invented Zippers, and I figured I'd share it with a little more elaboration to the world, since it's certainly been a bit of experimentation before I found a way that worked for me. Diagramming software for Linux sucks. Those [...]
Hello from Montreal! I'm writing this from a wireless connection up on the thirty-ninth floor of La Cité. Unfortunately, when we reading the lease, the only thing we checked was that it had "Internet"... not "Wireless." So what's a troop of MIT students with an arsenal of laptops and no wireless router to do? Set [...]
When I was seventeen, I wrote my very first shell script. It was a Windows batch file, bits and pieces very carefully cargo-culted from various code samples on the web. I had already had the exquisite pleasure of futzing with pear.bat, and the thought of scripting was not something I relished; "why not write the [...]
There are lots of little blog posts containing advice about various one-line options you can do in Vim. This post falls into that category, but I'm hoping to do a more comprehensive view into one small subsystem of Vim's configuration: automatic line wrapping. When programming, automatic line wrapping can be a little obnoxious because even [...]
unattended-upgrades is a nifty little package that will go ahead and automatically install updates for you as they become enabled. No serious system administrator should use this (you are testing updates before pushing them to the servers, right?) but for many personal uses automatic updates are really what you want; if you run sudo aptitude [...]
I use Sup and I love it; never mind the ridiculing from friends who've found their inbox get painfully slow as they broke the hundred thousand message mark or managed to get their index obliterated. It's not quite been an easy road to email nirvana and a ten email inbox, so here's a step-by-step guide [...]