Introducing LeechBlock
You arrive to your office. Quickly check urgent mails, close the mail program and browser and put a nice solid hour, hour and a half, even two straight hours of work. Then decide that you deserve a break, and maybe with a fresh cup of coffee from the coffee machine you decide to browse idly for a few minutes. And then a co-worker knocks at your door and asks if you are coming to lunch.
Below you can find a non exhaustive list of the best programming books I have read so far. I have read a lot more books about programming, but most of them I read and promptly forgot about them. I am reading currently a few more (Code Complete, Thinking Forth), and maybe they can make it into a list like this that my future self writes.
And now, the list of the best programming books I have read so far.
The Ben NanoNote has very few applications, as of now. And one it has (among a few nice others), is Gcal. I didn’t know what Gcal was, and the Qi hardware wiki page on Gcal pointed me to this quite nice tutorial: The many uses of Gcal.
The tutorial is quite good, but somewhat long, and lacks a few specific examples, so I decided to write just what I read in that tutorial, mixed with the uses I am putting it to, so it is more a Gcal use cases than a full blown tutorial like that.
Screenshot compositing, made with free software
Since I bought the Nanonote, I have been finding new uses for it. Music player, note taker, voice recorder. I can also use it to start learning Python again, or Perl, which are (together with Lua) the languages currently installed by default.
After my first successful port (gnugo), I decided to try something else, and while idling at the train I thought that pMARS, the portable Memory Array Redcode Simulator was probably a good bet.
As I promised in my previous post reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer, here I collect 8 reader reasons for re-inventing the wheel from comments on the reddit thread and on page comments. They are in no particular order AFAIK.
You need a faster wheel: Embedded software is the prime example of such. Average 10 cycles, worst case 15 cycles is not good when your system can explode if you do not attain 14 cycles at most.
The command line. That small place, where a lot can happen. And more so if you are a Linux user… How to maximize it? Where to harness its power?
I discovered commandlinefu.com a few years ago, while looking for a way to do… something. I don’t even enter that often, although it is a brilliant place to discover how to do X in Linux/UNIX.
Among its all time greats I found some gems, and some others I discovered elsewhere, or even I made up.