How many years have you been making the tedious stretch for Ctrl and Esc keys? Maybe you’ve gone so far as choosing workflows that don’t require them much, maybe without even realizing it. That would be sad. You just can’t use vim or emacs (or even web browsers) without them.* I stopped the stretching a [...]
They say you should learn a new programming language every year. I don’t necessarily agree, but it’s happening this year for me with R. Here are the steps I have found over the years to make it go smoothly. If you’re a perl, C++, or Java zealot, it’s been nice knowing you…
Continue reading about How to Choose and Learn a New Programming Language
It’s quite an investment to pick up a new programming language (syntax, semantics, types), along with all its periphery: tools, libraries, interfaces, environment, documentation, culture, user groups, history, idioms, and quirks. I’m not trying to force myself to learn a new language every year, though looking back it’s pretty much turned out that way. I [...]
I’m getting pretty excited for the first meeting of the PDX-visualization group (which I convinced Ed to expand his R Language Study group into). One of the topics we’ll be going over is Graphviz. It’s old as dirt (ChangeLog goes back to 2000 at v1.7, but I’m guessing it’s at least a decade older) and [...]
Some webhosts make it a bit tedious to send email from your shell, and even harder inside your scripts or web apps. But setting up Django properly enables this to become a one-liner whenever you need it.
Our front-end guru wants to take the plunge and get to know more about our middle and back (and way-back) ends. There are more than a couple steps down the road to mastery, but the essentials are enough to get you well on your way. This is a brief (link-farm) guide for someone with some [...]
Continue reading about Python Web Development Getting Started Guide
I find myself printing out PDFs frequently. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the comfort of a recliner while I read, and my idea of portability is something printed. Maybe this is why I spend all my money on real books. But that has got to stop! I’ve noticed a trend that most of [...]
I’m pretty picky when it comes to how I look at my code. My tastes might even be a bit unique — I like things really small, colorful (earth-toned rainbow), and highly differentiated. There are so many things that I value in a scheme that I decided to try and collect them here. I use [...]
It’s amazing how many different purposes there are for code comments. Most comments are treated the same by compilers/interpreters — ignored. But humans have their own semantics based on some established conventions. And “meta-processors” also do a lot with these; e.g., generating documentation, running tests, executing debug statements, locating tickets, assigning to variables, syntax highlighting [...]
If I’m going to have a productive day, it usually means spending it in a shell. I use GNOME Terminal as my xterm clone of choice, simply because it’s a default. If you don’t know what terminal you’re using, it’s probably gnome-terminal if you’re running GNOME. I recently started making some productivity tweaks to my [...]