I’ve used top for years to monitor machine activity. It’s grown some new features and behavior in the last few years that you might not be aware of. Good ol’ top. For years it’s been the cornerstone of process control. It’s the first place we turn to hunt down a rogue process, or just to [...]
Over the years I’ve gotten a lot of value out of reading Amazon reviews. But only recently have I actually become a contributor to their sophisticated social system (a different S3 . Now I’m discovering some great benefits to writing reviews — let me share them with you. Here are the reasons it might be [...]
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Ha-choo! If you’re not already using Google Reader, go get it, load your OPML, and try this: ‘?’. Excuse me; sorry for sneezing all over you. After spending a few years in the blogosphere using unsatisfying readers, I made the move to Google Reader a couple months ago. It just had so much to offer. [...]
This is a constraint-based exercise to force myself to do something quickly and imperfectly. I have a hard time discerning the right point at which to stop tuning things. It took me three years of searching for the perfect blogging tool before I finally bit the bullet and just forced myself to go with an [...]
These are the languages that I consider interesting* today. I’ve included their approximate year of first release. Also, a look at the importance of support for concurrency. As you can see, these fit into a surprisingly small time window, which I’ll call the Golden Age.** I wanted to make it a round decade, but had [...]
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Like many other hackers who sit in wonky chairs for 12+ hours every day, I have a bit of a “back problem”. And of course I’m an optimizer, AKA cheapskate (which surely contributes to the problem). Even so, I still end up dropping 50 bucks each month on chiropractic visits. How can I optimize that?! [...]
Functional Programming is old. Ancient. Like right after FORTRAN. But it’s the future. Trust me, I’m named after the dude who knew about Jesus 700 years early. Seriously, it’s not going to take 700 years for FP to go mainstream. Some would argue that it already is. Python, Ruby, and others have adopted a number [...]
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