C++ in Coders at Work
One of the topics I asked most of my Coders at Work interviewees about was C++. I am not an expert, or even a competent C++ programmer and recognize that my own opinions about C++ are not well-info…
Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
[UPDATE: To all those who got here by clicking a link entitled “Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India”, that title has been retired as an unfortunate misfire on my pa…
Vim is hard, I just want to click around
Jeff Kreeftmeijer's Vim configuration
Patent 5,893,120 reduced to mathematical formulae
I have previously argued that the Bilski ruling renders all software unpatentable in the US because any method of manipulating information ...
Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark
I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to…
A Look Inside the Process of One of the World’s Most Efficient Studiers
Scott Young’s Graduation Gift to Study Hacks I have to give credit to Scott Young: it was talking blogs with him back in 2007 that ... Read more
How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre.
A great find: In his 1956 short story, “Let’s Get Together,” Isaac Asimov describes security measures proposed to counter a terrorist threat: “Consider further that this news will leak out as more and more people become involved in our countermeasures and more and more people begin to guess what we’re doing. Then…
The Prime That Wasn’t
Life, technology, and other good things
Build Doom3 on MacOSX with XCode4
The source code of Doom3 has been released three days ago :) ! I have started to read it and I will probably write a code review if enough people are interested. According to the README.txt the source code is building well with Visual Studio 2010 but it is not building at all on Mac OS X with XCode 4.0 ( it is…
Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes
Perl is a dynamic, dynamically-typed, high-level, scripting (interpreted) language most comparable with PHP and Python. Perl's syntax owes a lot to ancient shell scripting tools, and it is famed for its overuse of confusing symbols, the majority of which are impossible to Google ...
All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook...
I don’t mean to overhype this, but frankly I don’t think it would be possible to overhype something as huge and profound as what Facebook introduced yesterday, at least from what I gather reading the reports coming out of F8. Timelines. Open Graph. Apps. Music. Video. Bam! It’s all there and it’s all amazing and huge…
How to send and reply to email
Many of the tips below are already widely followed in academia, where debate and discussion over email have been taking place for decades.