If you want faster surfing on EDGE or GPRS, get Opera Mini. It slims down the HTML and graphics substantially before it gets to your phone. It breathed new life into my Sony Ericsson P910 (GPRS only), making it faster in use than Pocket Explorer my wife's EDGE phone with the AT&T network. The inability to use alternatives like Opera Mini is part of why I'm not as excited about the iPhone as I thought it would be.
I'm an operating system nut (UNIX administrator for a living), and would love to learn z/OS. The problem with learning z/OS is that there is such a high barrier to entry to get into the proper situation to do so.
While you can use open source utilities like Hercules to run z/OS on an x86 machine, the means of acquiring z/OS legally or illegally is certainly not easy. In fact, it's very unlikely.
Unlike other operating systems, you can't just easily buy a machine to run z/OS on eBay. Heck, I'm not quite sure what the oldest and most affordable machine that can run z/OS is. The cheapest S/390 I've seen on ebay is in the thousands of dollars. Whereas the barrier to entry for learning AIX is just a $150 43p away.
I'd still love to be able to run z/OS at home somewhere for learning it. It's just not terribly easy to do so.
Huh? OpenOffice has runs very nicely on other architectures such as SPARC and MIPS, and in fact, it's predecessor, StarOffice was sold for such platforms. I mean, the project is basically run by Sun! It was not x86-specific by any stretch of the imagination. Mac OS X has it's own set of peculiaraties that make porting the code of this particular project a bit of a pain. For more information, see Compiler and Other Technical Issues in the Mac OS X 10.0.x Platform.
Re:Reviewer catches himself.
on
Data Crunching
·
· Score: 3, Informative
FYI: It's worth mentioning that rev is not very close to being universal either, existing only on Linux and BSD boxes as best as I can tell. tail -r is more universal in that it works under both SYSV and BSD variants, but oddly enough: not Linux.
The GNU tail folks were pretty stubborn about keeping their file reversal in the tac command, wreaking havoc with cross platform scripts everywhere.:)
Re:DVORAK for real world, SysAdmin/Programming use
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As a system administrator who switched to Dvorak about 5 years ago (tendinitis), I was curious too. So, I piped my shell history (533 lines worth) to a file and ran it through a finger movement calculator. The results are as follows:
Dvorak: Total strokes are 14613 and total distance is 19593.6341607972.
QWERTY: Total strokes are 14869 and total distance is 26349.32260203948.
So, there you have it. If you're a UNIX admin who uses QWERTY, you are moving your fingers around 34% more than a Dvorak administrator, at least if you're using commands similar to mine.
Is it me, or does it seem like they neglect to mention iPhoto or iMovie on the Tiger pages (other than integration). Do we now have to buy iLife in order to get these? If so, how lame.
Someone should mod this up. I use Bibble under Linux and love it. The only thing I really need now is Spyder color calibration support for Linux. For now, I just double check my results elsewhere.
It sounds like you're talking about the first generation of the Roomba's.. similar to what I have. It's a pain to charge, and the canister is woefully small.
The second generation Roomba claims to have a dirt canister that is 3 times as large, and can automatically locate it's charging base and recharge for you. I have not yet tried one, but as my first generation one died recently, I can only hope that someone gets me one for Christmas.
I hate replying to myself, but another comment reminded me of something important.
In everything you do, you should try to relate it to something familiar to the user. If the user knows Windows, relate everything you can to them. Relate how/usr/bin is like Program Files, and that/etc is like the registry. Relate how X11 and Window managers and such work like Quartz and Finder. It helps to make strange names a little more familiar.
I completely agree. I have to constantly nail into their head what goes where. The hardest part is/sbin vs/usr/sbin. In order to help them understand, I draw a big diagram on the board showing them what each directory goes, and how it parallels with Windows and Mac OS X.
It helps, but I have to drill into their head file locations every lesson it seems. At least until I teach them locate.
I think you're about on track. So far I've had to teach two people at my current workplace (one mac user, one windows user) about Linux so that I can have a backup for when I go on vacation.
The first thing I do is have them install Linux on a desktop -- SUSE in my case at the moment. While installing, I give them a bit of the history and philosophy, since it really helps in understanding why there are 2,000 packages to choose from, and why everything is modular and named weirdly (why do you have Linux, X11, Sawfish, Gnome, *AND* KDE?).
Then I get them to learn how to make it a usable desktop machine for regular things (browsing, e-mail). After teaching them how to patch the machine, I start giving them administrative tasks.
I mostly needed a backup for doing desktop support, as we've got about 50 unix servers and 100 unix desktops. Most of my training curriculum is tuned to giving them the ability to help other people with their mostly desktop problems, but perhaps you could make use of my Linux Training Syllabus anyways. It's setup as two 60-90 minute sessions a week, with the expectation that after 6 weeks they can handle all the normal problems that come up. It's been pretty successful so far, and I've got another coworker starting it in a few weeks.
The hardest part for me was determining an order of lessons. For instance, I decided on teaching them how to customize their environment last. I need them to be able to handle whatever environment gets thrown at them without customization, and it's not crucial for them to debug problems. It is however, a great timesaver if you've really tuned your environment for you.
I suppose the most important lesson of all is teaching them to use manpages and google to solve most of their problems. It annoys them when you don't give them a straight answer on how to fix something, but it really does make them more independent.
My love affair with joe.
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My first text editor in UNIX was vi. I hated it's arcane commands, but saw it's usefulness if I was actually on the 300 baud connection it was designed for. I was then introduced to pico. I used pico for a few years, and it's just about as simple of a text editor as you would want. The commands are fairly easy, but sometimes I needed to go to the help screens, and hated navigating through them to fine some of the stranger options I wanted. I was also frustrated by the lack of advanced features that I knew from vi, like command line pipes and such.
I don't recall from where, but a few years later in 1997, I found joe. As a former pico and vi user, I really liked joe. It allowed you to show all the shortcuts on the top of the screen while you were editing documents, so it was easier to learn than pico, and it allowed many of the advanced functions of vi.
For instance, command line pipes are probably my most used joe feature that wasn't available in pico (maybe someone snuck it in recently). You can select a bunch of text, and hit Ctrl-K/. You are then prompted for a command line that all this text will be sent through. Your command line can be as easy as "sort", and all of your lines that you are selected, or as complex as a command-line perl script. For me, the most common are sort, uniq, cut, and perl.
On top of that, joe felt natural. From 1987 to 1996 I used Wordstar throughout all of my school reports. I knew all of the key combinations by heart.
I get weird looks from other senior UNIX admins still when they ask "vi or emacs?", and I answer "joe". I've been doing UNIX admin work now for 8 years, and still hate vi to this very day. I know enough to get a machine repaired enough to install joe, however. joe, screen, and zsh are the first 3 things to get installed on any machine I administer: from Linux, to Solaris, to IRIX to FreeBSD. When I teach new people UNIX, I teach them with joe, not vi. If I ever meet Joseph Allen, I'll be sure to buy him a drink!
The Mac OS X printing engine is actually open source (The same CUPS that ESR ran into trouble with), as I'm sure you are aware. Go to http://127.0.0.1:631/ if you want to totally ignore all parts of the Mac OS X GUI and go straight for the guts.
Want a text file to edit? Try/etc/cups/cupsd.conf -- enabling all of the debugging info is a great start.
Want a manpage? man cupsd.conf
Want logfiles with weird error messages? Try taking a look at/var/log/cups
Not saying it will fix your problem. I'm just saying that you can't blame the proprietary operating system. You have the source code for the printing service!
I've been using 3-button mice since the PC Paintbrush IV days, and I have to say, I still use them every day. Nothing like that big middle button to slap to pop browser links into new tabs, and paste text.
At first I used to be a fan of Logitech, SGI and Sun's 3-button mice, but now I don't leave home without a Contour Perfit Mouse. It's 3-button, and there are not only left and right handed versions, but multiple sizes for each. It melds into your hand, so you only have to inch forward a bit of muscle in each finger to press a button. Very nice and ergonomic.
I'm dying to try out their new optical mice myself. They were pretty slow to the game there, to be sure. I do like where they've put the scroll button for those.
For whatever reason, this version of Safari, as well as v.71, won't work with the cookies in Bugzilla. On two machines I've tried it on both bugzilla.mozilla.org and our own internal versions of it. Kind of annoying to work with tickets all day at work and have to keep re-logging in. Hopefully this issue has a nice workaround either on the Safari or the Bugzilla side.
I currently recommend a nightly build of Camino instead for these users. It now has a pretty nifty & flexible Google search bar finally (obligatory screenshot). I do miss the spell-as-you-type feature in Safari however.
Sprint Vision is CDMA2000 (2.5G), not WCDMA/UTMS (3G). Even though their marketing says otherwise, their technical information says so.
Not 3G, but nonetheless useful for me!
on
3G Phones and E-mail?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The way I handle my e-mail on my cellphone is pretty basic.
I've got a perl script that checks my IMAP4 mailbox every 3 minutes between 8am and 11pm. It's available at http://toadstool.sh/files/mailgeek.pl (it's a modded version of another script I use, as you'll be able to tell).
mailgeek.pl searches for any message in INBOX that is older than 10 minutes old, but still has an unread flag. If any message is found that matches these requirements, it gets compressed with the fine email2sms software, and e-mailed to my Cingular email to sms gateway at phone#@mobile.mycingular.net. Sadly, the gateway doesn't seem to support concatanated SMS's, so I only get the first 160 characters of the email2sms compressed e-mail.
Usually, this is well enough for me to get the idea of the message. If it is not, my Sony-Ericsson P800 has an IMAP4 client built in to it, though I don't use it much because the Cingular GPRS costs are absolutely ridiculous.
I woulda just billed em. The RAID crashed at the place I had been laid off from last, and the only admin just had a cyst removed from his shoulder so he couldn't type. In a panic, they gave me a call.
I had already gotten a new job, but I was happy to work with em on an evening, for $70/hr:) Got everything back within 45 minutes, spent another half hour "stress testing" the RAID, and I was off.
I mean, I would have at least charged them $10/hr. if I was you:)
While not strictly "theory", but more good programming attitude & habits - I highly recommend picking up a copy of "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master". I cannot recommend this book nearly enough. While it may not teach you a specific language, it teaches you general best practices in getting the job done in an effective manner. I'll rip off one of the quotes from the Amazon.com page:
This book is an excellent distillation of practical experience and advice covering all phases of software development. While it's written mainly for the software developer, project managers will get valuable insight from the book on effective software development practice. The strength of this book is that it draws heavily from the authors' experience. Rather that promote a methodology, it promotes attitudes, values, tools and proven practices that will help anyone become a better software developer and make the job of software development more creative and stimulating. It's especially good for new software developers as it contains many lessons that experienced developers only learn the hard way. The book is well organized in easily digestible segments, with a very good cross reference system that makes it handy for repeated use. The appendix presents many valuable resources that professional programmers will want to explore.
I actually got introduced to it because the same guys later went on to write a pretty decent Book on Ruby. However useful that book was to learning Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmer was useful to fostering a positive set of habits and attitude toward programming in General. At least do yourself a favor and read the rest of the comments on Amazon.com before dismissing this underrated classic!
1. In Finder, Click on the Applications Icon 2. Scroll Down to Internet Explorer 3. Double click on the text for Internet Explorer. Rename it to Internet Monopoly 4. Enjoy being spared the Software Update.
I myself went and tgz'd mine up. This way I can test it when I feel, but not have it show up in System Preferences as a browser choice.
As far as Chimera updates, people may recommend ChimeraKnight, but some builds are really unstable. I myself look through the Chimera Forums in the Nightly Build area, and look for good reports. That said, I'm still using 2002092604:)
Every configuration change on the UNIX systems gets a Bugzilla ticket. This helps track our rational for making the change, who requested it, and who was involved in making the decision.
I also normally do one of these in the ticket to reference it:
* log the commands run to make the change. Not only is this great search engine fodder later, but it helps peer review.
* If it's a config file or script change, I often paste or attach a diff (depending on it's size) into the ticket.
For instance, I just closed one request for adding some developers to the sudoers file. I pasted the lines added into there.
The second thing that happens is any file in/etc, or any script we use, is in CVS. This is most useful for programs who's configuration constantly changes (Nagios, for instance).
The CVS usage gets a little fuzzy with configuration files outside of/etc, we're not doing a terribly good job at this. At my last place, every config file was in CVS.
I've written a cute wrapper around cvs for maintaining unix config files, so that non-UNIX folks can safely edit the files in a revision control environment without knowing that CVS is being used. I plan to release "revedit" once I can get this VaultHost stuff going.
The Triangle Mac Users Group meetings are held at the EPA building here in Durham. ~50(?) Mac geeks toting around laptops talking in a small conference room with a projector. No big deal.
Now, in order to get into the visitors area of EPA building where the "theatre" is, we have to fill out visitor cards with our name, address, phone number, etc. Then we have to fill out a check-in sheet with the guard (with our name, address, phone number, etc).. This isn't too bad, but a bit unusual for 50 people having to fill in to talk about their hobby.
The clincher is we've got a 3rd peice of paperwork to fill out now: Our laptop information. Brand, Model, Serial Number, Name, Address, Phone number, etc. Of course, no one has their serial numbers memorized, so it's time to bust out the laptop bags.
I can somewhat understand since it's in a "government" building - but this is a bit overboard for a hobbyist group meeting. It's worse than going to the airport - picture 50 geeks in line to fill out 3 peices of paperwork, and only 1 of them brought a pen!
Enough ranting now I guess.. I'm gonna have to recommend we meet in McDonalds next time or something.
Quick iCal-iPod Sync until iSync comes out
on
Apple Releases iCal
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If you want to be able to view your iCal entries on your iPod, simply copy ~/Library/Calendars/* to/Volumes/(Name of iPod)/Calendars directory when your iPod is mounted up.
No need to export all your calendars since it's just.ics files:)
Major Human-Spam in Raleigh
on
Lulu Tech Circus
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Although I'm planning on going, mostly because Andrew Hunt of Ruby fame is going to be there, I got kind of burnt out by all the human-spam in the Raleigh area.
What do I mean by human spam? I mean, first I hear some LuLu rep talking about it at the local Triangle Mac Users Group meeting.. I laughed because 90% of the folks in that meeting don't know what "Darwin" is, let alone what most of the cool talks are about (except I did see they are offering Final Cut Pro seminars!).
Then the worst. A few days later THEY SPAMMED OUR SLASHDOT MEETUP! Of all the things to not spam, they sent some droid (Photo #2) over to our nice meetup at Flying Saucer, to sell us all on the idea of going to this thing.
After about 25 minutes, his salesmanship is over, and the business cards handed out, he dissappears.
What the hell were they thinking? Welp.. I guess if it gets folks to go.
Of course, our local slashdot trolling committe made fun of the silly name. But that's typical.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want faster surfing on EDGE or GPRS, get Opera Mini. It slims down the HTML and graphics substantially before it gets to your phone. It breathed new life into my Sony Ericsson P910 (GPRS only), making it faster in use than Pocket Explorer my wife's EDGE phone with the AT&T network. The inability to use alternatives like Opera Mini is part of why I'm not as excited about the iPhone as I thought it would be.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
I'm an operating system nut (UNIX administrator for a living), and would love to learn z/OS. The problem with learning z/OS is that there is such a high barrier to entry to get into the proper situation to do so.
While you can use open source utilities like Hercules to run z/OS on an x86 machine, the means of acquiring z/OS legally or illegally is certainly not easy. In fact, it's very unlikely.
Unlike other operating systems, you can't just easily buy a machine to run z/OS on eBay. Heck, I'm not quite sure what the oldest and most affordable machine that can run z/OS is. The cheapest S/390 I've seen on ebay is in the thousands of dollars. Whereas the barrier to entry for learning AIX is just a $150 43p away.
I'd still love to be able to run z/OS at home somewhere for learning it. It's just not terribly easy to do so.
Huh? OpenOffice has runs very nicely on other architectures such as SPARC and MIPS, and in fact, it's predecessor, StarOffice was sold for such platforms. I mean, the project is basically run by Sun! It was not x86-specific by any stretch of the imagination. Mac OS X has it's own set of peculiaraties that make porting the code of this particular project a bit of a pain. For more information, see Compiler and Other Technical Issues in the Mac OS X 10.0.x Platform.
FYI: It's worth mentioning that rev is not very close to being universal either, existing only on Linux and BSD boxes as best as I can tell. tail -r is more universal in that it works under both SYSV and BSD variants, but oddly enough: not Linux.
:)
The GNU tail folks were pretty stubborn about keeping their file reversal in the tac command, wreaking havoc with cross platform scripts everywhere.
As a system administrator who switched to Dvorak about 5 years ago (tendinitis), I was curious too. So, I piped my shell history (533 lines worth) to a file and ran it through a finger movement calculator. The results are as follows:
Dvorak: Total strokes are 14613 and total distance is 19593.6341607972.
QWERTY: Total strokes are 14869 and total distance is 26349.32260203948.
So, there you have it. If you're a UNIX admin who uses QWERTY, you are moving your fingers around 34% more than a Dvorak administrator, at least if you're using commands similar to mine.
Is it me, or does it seem like they neglect to mention iPhoto or iMovie on the Tiger pages (other than integration). Do we now have to buy iLife in order to get these? If so, how lame.
Someone should mod this up. I use Bibble under Linux and love it. The only thing I really need now is Spyder color calibration support for Linux. For now, I just double check my results elsewhere.
It sounds like you're talking about the first generation of the Roomba's.. similar to what I have. It's a pain to charge, and the canister is woefully small.
The second generation Roomba claims to have a dirt canister that is 3 times as large, and can automatically locate it's charging base and recharge for you. I have not yet tried one, but as my first generation one died recently, I can only hope that someone gets me one for Christmas.
I hate replying to myself, but another comment reminded me of something important.
/usr/bin is like Program Files, and that /etc is like the registry. Relate how X11 and Window managers and such work like Quartz and Finder. It helps to make strange names a little more familiar.
In everything you do, you should try to relate it to something familiar to the user. If the user knows Windows, relate everything you can to them. Relate how
I completely agree. I have to constantly nail into their head what goes where. The hardest part is /sbin vs /usr/sbin. In order to help them understand, I draw a big diagram on the board showing them what each directory goes, and how it parallels with Windows and Mac OS X.
It helps, but I have to drill into their head file locations every lesson it seems. At least until I teach them locate.
I think you're about on track. So far I've had to teach two people at my current workplace (one mac user, one windows user) about Linux so that I can have a backup for when I go on vacation.
The first thing I do is have them install Linux on a desktop -- SUSE in my case at the moment. While installing, I give them a bit of the history and philosophy, since it really helps in understanding why there are 2,000 packages to choose from, and why everything is modular and named weirdly (why do you have Linux, X11, Sawfish, Gnome, *AND* KDE?).
Then I get them to learn how to make it a usable desktop machine for regular things (browsing, e-mail). After teaching them how to patch the machine, I start giving them administrative tasks.
I mostly needed a backup for doing desktop support, as we've got about 50 unix servers and 100 unix desktops. Most of my training curriculum is tuned to giving them the ability to help other people with their mostly desktop problems, but perhaps you could make use of my Linux Training Syllabus anyways. It's setup as two 60-90 minute sessions a week, with the expectation that after 6 weeks they can handle all the normal problems that come up. It's been pretty successful so far, and I've got another coworker starting it in a few weeks.
The hardest part for me was determining an order of lessons. For instance, I decided on teaching them how to customize their environment last. I need them to be able to handle whatever environment gets thrown at them without customization, and it's not crucial for them to debug problems. It is however, a great timesaver if you've really tuned your environment for you.
I suppose the most important lesson of all is teaching them to use manpages and google to solve most of their problems. It annoys them when you don't give them a straight answer on how to fix something, but it really does make them more independent.
My first text editor in UNIX was vi. I hated it's arcane commands, but saw it's usefulness if I was actually on the 300 baud connection it was designed for. I was then introduced to pico. I used pico for a few years, and it's just about as simple of a text editor as you would want. The commands are fairly easy, but sometimes I needed to go to the help screens, and hated navigating through them to fine some of the stranger options I wanted. I was also frustrated by the lack of advanced features that I knew from vi, like command line pipes and such.
I don't recall from where, but a few years later in 1997, I found joe. As a former pico and vi user, I really liked joe. It allowed you to show all the shortcuts on the top of the screen while you were editing documents, so it was easier to learn than pico, and it allowed many of the advanced functions of vi.
For instance, command line pipes are probably my most used joe feature that wasn't available in pico (maybe someone snuck it in recently). You can select a bunch of text, and hit Ctrl-K/. You are then prompted for a command line that all this text will be sent through. Your command line can be as easy as "sort", and all of your lines that you are selected, or as complex as a command-line perl script. For me, the most common are sort, uniq, cut, and perl.
On top of that, joe felt natural. From 1987 to 1996 I used Wordstar throughout all of my school reports. I knew all of the key combinations by heart.
I get weird looks from other senior UNIX admins still when they ask "vi or emacs?", and I answer "joe". I've been doing UNIX admin work now for 8 years, and still hate vi to this very day. I know enough to get a machine repaired enough to install joe, however. joe, screen, and zsh are the first 3 things to get installed on any machine I administer: from Linux, to Solaris, to IRIX to FreeBSD. When I teach new people UNIX, I teach them with joe, not vi. If I ever meet Joseph Allen, I'll be sure to buy him a drink!
The Mac OS X printing engine is actually open source (The same CUPS that ESR ran into trouble with), as I'm sure you are aware. Go to http://127.0.0.1:631/ if you want to totally ignore all parts of the Mac OS X GUI and go straight for the guts.
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf -- enabling all of the debugging info is a great start.
/var/log/cups
Want a text file to edit? Try
Want a manpage? man cupsd.conf
Want logfiles with weird error messages? Try taking a look at
Not saying it will fix your problem. I'm just saying that you can't blame the proprietary operating system. You have the source code for the printing service!
I've been using 3-button mice since the PC Paintbrush IV days, and I have to say, I still use them every day. Nothing like that big middle button to slap to pop browser links into new tabs, and paste text.
At first I used to be a fan of Logitech, SGI and Sun's 3-button mice, but now I don't leave home without a Contour Perfit Mouse. It's 3-button, and there are not only left and right handed versions, but multiple sizes for each. It melds into your hand, so you only have to inch forward a bit of muscle in each finger to press a button. Very nice and ergonomic.
I'm dying to try out their new optical mice myself. They were pretty slow to the game there, to be sure. I do like where they've put the scroll button for those.
Long live the *real* middle button.
For whatever reason, this version of Safari, as well as v.71, won't work with the cookies in Bugzilla. On two machines I've tried it on both bugzilla.mozilla.org and our own internal versions of it. Kind of annoying to work with tickets all day at work and have to keep re-logging in. Hopefully this issue has a nice workaround either on the Safari or the Bugzilla side.
I currently recommend a nightly build of Camino instead for these users. It now has a pretty nifty & flexible Google search bar finally (obligatory screenshot). I do miss the spell-as-you-type feature in Safari however.
Sprint Vision is CDMA2000 (2.5G), not WCDMA/UTMS (3G). Even though their marketing says otherwise, their technical information says so.
The way I handle my e-mail on my cellphone is pretty basic.
I've got a perl script that checks my IMAP4 mailbox every 3 minutes between 8am and 11pm. It's available at http://toadstool.sh/files/mailgeek.pl (it's a modded version of another script I use, as you'll be able to tell).
mailgeek.pl searches for any message in INBOX that is older than 10 minutes old, but still has an unread flag. If any message is found that matches these requirements, it gets compressed with the fine email2sms software, and e-mailed to my Cingular email to sms gateway at phone#@mobile.mycingular.net. Sadly, the gateway doesn't seem to support concatanated SMS's, so I only get the first 160 characters of the email2sms compressed e-mail.
Usually, this is well enough for me to get the idea of the message. If it is not, my Sony-Ericsson P800 has an IMAP4 client built in to it, though I don't use it much because the Cingular GPRS costs are absolutely ridiculous.
Hope someone gets ideas from this.
I woulda just billed em. The RAID crashed at the place I had been laid off from last, and the only admin just had a cyst removed from his shoulder so he couldn't type. In a panic, they gave me a call.
:) Got everything back within 45 minutes, spent another half hour "stress testing" the RAID, and I was off.
:)
I had already gotten a new job, but I was happy to work with em on an evening, for $70/hr
I mean, I would have at least charged them $10/hr. if I was you
While not strictly "theory", but more good programming attitude & habits - I highly recommend picking up a copy of "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master". I cannot recommend this book nearly enough. While it may not teach you a specific language, it teaches you general best practices in getting the job done in an effective manner. I'll rip off one of the quotes from the Amazon.com page:
This book is an excellent distillation of practical experience and advice covering all phases of software development. While it's written mainly for the software developer, project managers will get valuable insight from the book on effective software development practice. The strength of this book is that it draws heavily from the authors' experience. Rather that promote a methodology, it promotes attitudes, values, tools and proven practices that will help anyone become a better software developer and make the job of software development more creative and stimulating. It's especially good for new software developers as it contains many lessons that experienced developers only learn the hard way. The book is well organized in easily digestible segments, with a very good cross reference system that makes it handy for repeated use. The appendix presents many valuable resources that professional programmers will want to explore.
I actually got introduced to it because the same guys later went on to write a pretty decent Book on Ruby. However useful that book was to learning Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmer was useful to fostering a positive set of habits and attitude toward programming in General. At least do yourself a favor and read the rest of the comments on Amazon.com before dismissing this underrated classic!
Steps to Disable Internet Explorer Update:
:)
1. In Finder, Click on the Applications Icon
2. Scroll Down to Internet Explorer
3. Double click on the text for Internet Explorer. Rename it to Internet Monopoly
4. Enjoy being spared the Software Update.
I myself went and tgz'd mine up. This way I can test it when I feel, but not have it show up in System Preferences as a browser choice.
As far as Chimera updates, people may recommend ChimeraKnight, but some builds are really unstable. I myself look through the Chimera Forums in the Nightly Build area, and look for good reports. That said, I'm still using 2002092604
Every configuration change on the UNIX systems gets a Bugzilla ticket. This helps track our rational for making the change, who requested it, and who was involved in making the decision.
/etc, or any script we use, is in CVS. This is most useful for programs who's configuration constantly changes (Nagios, for instance).
/etc, we're not doing a terribly good job at this. At my last place, every config file was in CVS.
I also normally do one of these in the ticket to reference it:
* log the commands run to make the change. Not only is this great search engine fodder later, but it helps peer review.
* If it's a config file or script change, I often paste or attach a diff (depending on it's size) into the ticket.
For instance, I just closed one request for adding some developers to the sudoers file. I pasted the lines added into there.
The second thing that happens is any file in
The CVS usage gets a little fuzzy with configuration files outside of
I've written a cute wrapper around cvs for maintaining unix config files, so that non-UNIX folks can safely edit the files in a revision control environment without knowing that CVS is being used. I plan to release "revedit" once I can get this VaultHost stuff going.
The Triangle Mac Users Group meetings are held at the EPA building here in Durham. ~50(?) Mac geeks toting around laptops talking in a small conference room with a projector. No big deal.
Now, in order to get into the visitors area of EPA building where the "theatre" is, we have to fill out visitor cards with our name, address, phone number, etc. Then we have to fill out a check-in sheet with the guard (with our name, address, phone number, etc).. This isn't too bad, but a bit unusual for 50 people having to fill in to talk about their hobby.
The clincher is we've got a 3rd peice of paperwork to fill out now: Our laptop information. Brand, Model, Serial Number, Name, Address, Phone number, etc. Of course, no one has their serial numbers memorized, so it's time to bust out the laptop bags.
I can somewhat understand since it's in a "government" building - but this is a bit overboard for a hobbyist group meeting. It's worse than going to the airport - picture 50 geeks in line to fill out 3 peices of paperwork, and only 1 of them brought a pen!
Enough ranting now I guess.. I'm gonna have to recommend we meet in McDonalds next time or something.
If you want to be able to view your iCal entries on your iPod, simply copy ~/Library/Calendars/* to /Volumes/(Name of iPod)/Calendars directory when your iPod is mounted up.
.ics files :)
No need to export all your calendars since it's just
Although I'm planning on going, mostly because Andrew Hunt of Ruby fame is going to be there, I got kind of burnt out by all the human-spam in the Raleigh area.
What do I mean by human spam? I mean, first I hear some LuLu rep talking about it at the local Triangle Mac Users Group meeting.. I laughed because 90% of the folks in that meeting don't know what "Darwin" is, let alone what most of the cool talks are about (except I did see they are offering Final Cut Pro seminars!).
Then the worst. A few days later THEY SPAMMED OUR SLASHDOT MEETUP! Of all the things to not spam, they sent some droid (Photo #2) over to our nice meetup at Flying Saucer, to sell us all on the idea of going to this thing.
After about 25 minutes, his salesmanship is over, and the business cards handed out, he dissappears.
What the hell were they thinking? Welp.. I guess if it gets folks to go.
Of course, our local slashdot trolling committe made fun of the silly name. But that's typical.