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03 Sep 2010
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Remember kids: computing is for work, not fun.

Now, I consider Ubuntu to be a fairly progressive Linux distro. There is something that is a bit odd, though. I was poking through the .bashrc in my home folder to see what the default bash settings are in Ubuntu, when to my surprise, I found this gem:#
Sep 03 2010 08:58 PM
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Adventures in BSD-land

This is an operating systems post. If you don't care about computer operating systems, please read something else.I've been using Linux (occasionally known as GNU/Linux) for about the last 13 years. I'm not really an expert, just an enthusiast. Along the
Aug 23 2010 06:39 PM
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Stupid Ubuntu Trick #006 : Make Pylons work

Yeah, so you can't seem to initialize a Pylons application correctly in Ubuntu 10.04? Seeing an error like this?IOError: No egg-info directory foundYou must have forgotten to install python-setuptools. Try again. This time with more mind-reading.
Aug 17 2010 10:19 PM
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More Addicting Q&A Sites From Stack Exchange

The folks that brought us Stack Overflow, the ultimate addicting Q&A site for programmers, have dropped another bomb. They have started pumping out Stack Exchange sites based on community consensus and involvement. These are Q&A sites that use the Stack
Aug 14 2010 11:41 AM
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Run Your Own Personal Git Repo On a VPS

If you've got a VPS and you'd like to use it to host private git repositories, as a backup for your own work, it's pretty simple. First thing is you need to setup password-less ssh logins. That's covered in a lot of places, but I'll get to that too, if
Aug 09 2010 06:17 PM
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I Need A Drummer

Some years ago, I fancied myself some sort of garage musician. I had a guitar, that's all you need, right? I wrote and home-recorded a few songs. I was going to school, so, I didn't know too much about the difficulties of doing music as a profession.
Aug 09 2010 10:29 AM
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Git is Magic

Where I work we've switched our biggest project from Subversion revision control to Git. It is a large code base. I've been using Git for personal projects for awhile, but I've been keeping it pretty simple. For a large project with several contributors,
Jul 24 2010 09:53 PM
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Spammed Again By LinuxQuestions.org

Not only does LinuxQuestions.org spam users relentlessly, force you to log in to stop the spam, and generally have the crappiest forum software coded by lower primates, unchecking the "Receive Community Bulletins" checkbox in the account options page
Jul 20 2010 02:06 PM
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Beginner Python Program Example

I'm currently teaching a sort of introduction to programming class using Python. It's a fantastic beginner's programming language because it is very approachable. There is no minimum boilerplate code, like having to create a class in Java just to print
Jul 19 2010 05:10 PM
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Follow-up To Anti-IDE Rant

OK, I wrote an anti-IDE rant some days ago, dissing NetBeans and its ilk and extolling the virtues of Vim as my primary code editor. Read that here, if you are curious. I took some liberties with the English language, for which I sincerely apologize to
Jul 09 2010 11:41 PM
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LCD replacement on a Gateway LT2032u, etc

5 days ago, I ordered a replacement LCD screen for Megan's netbook, a run-of-the-mill Gateway LT2032u machine. The screen had cracked due to an unfortunate fall. I was able to install the replacement in less than an hour, and it works perfectly. The
Jul 02 2010 08:14 AM
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Notes On Running Ubuntu Linux on an Old Computer

These are some packages that I found useful running Ubuntu 10.04 on a 10+ year old laptop. This laptop is so awesome it has a CDROM and a floppy drive built-in! It's maxed out at 384 MB of RAM which is pretty nice considering it shipped with 64. It's a
Jun 29 2010 09:46 AM
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My .vimrc

This is mostly for my own benefit, so I can copy/paste it when I'm setting up a new system: set nocompatibleset tabstop=4set shiftwidth=4set smarttabset expandtabset softtabstop=4set autoindentset smartindent set showcmdset hlsearchset incsearchset
Jun 28 2010 11:35 PM
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So long and fare well to the IDE

Netbeans crashed. Again. For the last time.I'm normally a patient man, but an IDE has only one thing it has to do. It has to allow me to edit text files. An IDE that crashes is worse at facilitating coding than a piece of paper. I've used them and I'm
Jun 26 2010 12:11 PM
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Kindle For PC Beta works on Linux

The latest versions of Kindle For PC don't run using Wine in Linux, but a few forum posts explain that the old beta does, so long as Wine is configured to run in Windows 98 mode. It took me awhile to track down a live link for the beta version, so I
Jun 17 2010 10:09 AM
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JavaScript Benchmark: Opera 10.60 vs. Google Chrome 5.0.375

I ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark of the latest Opera 10.60 64 bit Linux build from here. Apparently, the JavaScript engine not only rivals but looks to be a little faster than Chrome, at least for 64 bit Linux. The tests ran in 411 ms on Opera
Jun 15 2010 12:39 AM
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Serving up Django with Tornado

This article is mainly of interest to web developers who might want to publish a site built with the Django web framework in a lightweight fashion (without involving Apache). First, let me enumerate the stack that is serving this page to you right now.
Jun 07 2010 07:20 AM
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This Blog Now Django-Powered

This blog is now my first public site that I've built with the Python programming language and Django web framework. I needed some motivation to build a project that I could show people, so for the last week or so I've used a few bits of my personal time
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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The Reluctant Sysadmin

As a software developer, I work on top of abstraction layers. There are a number of black boxes I build on top of. Compilers and servers fall into this category. The less time I think about the mundane details of how the code I write gets run, the more
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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Don't believe every blog you read - a cautionary tale.

Right now, I am using DreamHost shared hosting to host my blog. They pretty much do what they say they do. There is an advantage to easy-click installs in the land of web hosting. I'm really not a server administrator. I'm a programmer. I don't like to
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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A Simple Compiler, Part 3: Back to Flex and Bison and C and then Lisp?

My quixotic quest to build my own programming language or die trying has lead my in a few different directions. In my last installment, I was going to bring my Python-based lexer and parser into the .NET world with IronPython. After pursuing that angle
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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A Simple Compiler, Part 2: Write My Own Lexer in Python

As you may remember from Part 1 of this series, I have embarked on the task of creating my own programming language. I wrote a lexer and parser for my theoretical language in Python using PLY. That is all well and good. The next part I need is a good
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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A Simple Compiler, Part 1: Parsing with Python and Ply

In an earlier blog post I encouraged folks to write their own programming language for fun and education. It may not end up being useful, but you'll probably have fun and almost certainly learn something along the way. That said, I've been making my own
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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Please, you wretched cookie-cutter forums of the internet, you can do so much better.

Once upon a time I answered a question on LinuxQuestions, a slow, ugly website that uses vBulletin--your average, run-of-the-mill, commercial, PHP-based forum software. I couldn't just answer the question, I had to create an account, and give them an
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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Compiler code generation: just flatten the tree

I spent some time tonight working on the compiler I am writing for my own education. I started this project while only understanding bits and pieces of what it takes to write a compiler, but I am quickly learning more. Various texts on compilers start
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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Create your own programming language for great justice

In an earlier post I wrote my wish-list for the perfect programming language (for me.) I believe most programmers have a perfect programming language in mind. It usually goes something like this: "I really like the object model of language W and the
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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Genie: Write Python-like code that runs as fast as pure C

There is an article on the Postabon Blog titled "Make Lisp 15x faster than Python or 4x faster than Java." In his benchmark, which is a tightly nested loop doing some trigonometric calculations, he achieves speed similar to Java with unoptimized Lisp and
Jun 04 2010 10:55 AM
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The Reluctant Sysadmin

As a software developer, I work on top of abstraction layers. There are a number of black boxes I build on top of. Compilers and servers fall into this category. The less time I think about the mundane details of how the code I write gets run, the more
 
postfuturist
Apr 26 2010 12:05 PM
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Don’t believe every blog you read – a cautionary tale.

Right now, I am using DreamHost shared hosting to host my blog. They pretty much do what they say they do. There is an advantage to easy-click installs in the land of web hosting. I’m really not a server administrator. I’m a programmer. I
 
postfuturist
Apr 20 2010 06:31 AM
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A Simple Compiler, Part 3: Back to Flex and Bison and C and then Lisp?

My quixotic quest to build my own programming language or die trying has lead my in a few different directions. In my last installment, I was going to bring my Python-based lexer and parser into the .NET world with IronPython. After pursuing that angle
 
postfuturist
Apr 16 2010 06:28 AM
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A Simple Compiler, Part 2: Write My Own Lexer in Python

As you may remember from Part 1 of this series, I have embarked on the task of creating my own programming language. I wrote a Lexer and Parser for my theoretical language in Python using PLY. That is all well and good. The next part I need is a good
Apr 02 2010 09:23 AM
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A Simple Compiler With Python and Ply: Step 1, Parsing

In an earlier blog post I encouraged folks to write their own programming language for fun and education. It may not end up being useful, but you’ll probably have fun and almost certainly learn something along the way. That said, I’ve been
Mar 25 2010 04:46 PM
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Please, you wretched cookie-cutter forums of the internet, you can do so much better.

Once upon a time I answered a question on LinuxQuestions, a slow, ugly website that uses vBulletin–your average, run-of-the-mill, commercial, PHP-based forum software. I couldn’t just answer the question, I had to create an account, an
Feb 15 2010 02:44 PM
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0
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Compiler code generation: just flatten the tree

I spent some time tonight working on the compiler I am writing for my own education. I started this project while only understanding bits and pieces of what it takes to write a compiler, but I am quickly learning more. Various texts on compilers start
Feb 09 2010 03:41 PM
vote up
0
vote down

Create your own programming language for great justice

In an earlier post I wrote my wish-list for the perfect programming language (for me.) I believe most programmers have a perfect programming language in mind. It usually goes something like this: “I really like the object model of language W and
Feb 08 2010 10:30 AM
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0
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Genie: Write Python-like code that runs as fast as pure C

There is an article on the Postabon Blog titled “Make Lisp 15x faster than Python or 4x faster than Java.” In his benchmark, which is a tightly nested loop doing some trigonometric calculations, he achieves speed similar to Java with
Feb 03 2010 03:47 PM
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Moving on from visualizations

I am beginning to question the appropriateness of visual aids in professional software development. When I only occasionally had to look at database structures and test out SQL queries, I used tools like phpMyAdmin and MySQL Workbench which provide GUI
Feb 01 2010 03:44 PM
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Getting Things Done

I work at a very small software company that has as clients other small businesses. We do custom software. In 2010 that means we do web development. We bid on projects, complete the projects we get, fix any bugs for free for 6 months, and charge a very
Jan 27 2010 02:17 PM
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My Programming Language Wish-List

I write custom software for a living. It’s usually fun, sometimes challenging, often tedious, but overall gratifying in a number of ways. One of these ways is that I get to be creative and build my own tools that help me write better software that
Jan 14 2010 09:04 PM
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My life without God

This is awkward. Most of my family and friends consider me to be a devout Christian. Mostly they believe this because that’s what I’ve been until relatively recently. I have a few things to get off my chest about this and to set the record
Dec 10 2009 03:43 PM