I’ve been in need of new workstation for a while, and finally plunked down the cash for it.  I built  a mid range workstation and installed the latest long term release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) 64 bit.  The install was remarkably painless, and all of the hardware was auto-magically detected and works great in Ubuntu.  Hardware support is much improved in the recent Ubuntu releases, but if you are looking for a rock solid build that just works with Ubuntu, give these specs a try. Read the rest of this entry »

Intimate knowledge of your code editor is required to be competent and productive developer.  Here is a list of shortcuts anyone on the path to becoming an emacs guru should be familiar with.  This shortcut reference card covers mostly intermediate and advanced shortcuts for GNU emacs (most of them will work with Xemacs as well.)  I learned some great new shortcuts while making this cheat sheet; I hope they will be helpful to my readers as well. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second interview in an ongoing (but sporadic) series of interviews with famous programmers and authors of books that should be required reading for any serious developer.  Lynne Jolitz is an accomplished author, 386BSD hacker, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and all-around geek.  She has long been a figure in the tech community.  Regular readers will remember that she was included in the analysis of famous programmers.  Lets get to the interview! Read the rest of this entry »

This is a list of the best sites on the net for practicing your coding chops, showing off your programming skills, and competing for fame and fortune. Exercise your brain by untangling obfuscation, applying algorithms knowledge, growing your inner math geek, or playing a bit of code golf. These sites have exercises to build on and refine what you already know, or learn the language du jour. Read the rest of this entry »

With all of the gloom and doom forecasts about the global recession and layoffs everywhere, I’m interested to hear how this mess is affecting programmers. Despite the generally abysmal outlook, many statistics specific to the tech sector fall into the unchanged or optimistic buckets.  Meanwhile, TechCrunch and others are proclaiming that the tech industry has been particularly hard hit.  So what say you? Read the rest of this entry »

This is a tutorial on how to setup a Subversion (SVN) repository on Windows that allows secure connections over SSH. The tutorial also goes through setting up an SVN client and connecting to the repository. Some basic knowledge of a UNIX based command line will help, but you might be able to muddle through without it. Read the rest of this entry »