The Tao of Programming
Posted: October 24, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen Leave a comment »When the program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes.
—The Master Programmer
Open-Source Games for Linux
Posted: October 15, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen Leave a comment »I was recently looking around to see the state of Linux-capable games, and I was surprised to stumble upon a bunch of really cool looking ones:
- The Battle for Wesnoth
- FlightGear
- Chromium B.S.U.
- Alien Arena
- SuperTux
- SuperTux Kart
- Tux Racer
- TREMULOUS
- Cube 2: Sauerbraten
Let me know if you have any particularly fun Linux games in the comments!
Setting locale failed error on Ubuntu or Debian
Posted: October 13, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen Leave a comment »Sometimes I get a weird error message when using apt-get or dpkg on certain Ubuntu or Debian systems. More particularly, this happened on a server I was running and confused me quite a bit. Basically, when working with packages, I kept getting the following message:
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "en_US.UTF-8",
LC_ALL = "en_US.UTF-8",
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
After some research online, I found the quickest was to fix this was to run (as root):
apt-get install language-pack-en-base
I was also told to execute the following, but I found it to be unnecessary:
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
dpkg-reconfigure locales
I hope this helps someone else, too. Remember to change en_US to your desired locale.
My Conky Configuration
Posted: October 1, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen Leave a comment »
Conky is a really cool Linux program that displays vital system stats right on your desktop. You can configure it to show other cool things by calling external programs. I’ve seen people add media player stats, the weather outside, and even a stock ticker. Conky is available at http://conky.sourceforge.net, and you can also see some more examples and more documentation there. My configuration is fairly simple, and I’ve attached it to this post to let you all see.
My .conkyrc file
Slashdot Comment: Architecture Astronauts
Posted: September 25, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen Leave a comment »I don’t think this guy ever worked with any software engineer with any significant amount of experience. Or maybe he just works with people that suck as software engineer.
The typical evolution towards wisdom in Software Engineering goes like this (simplified):
Pictures of My New Acer 1410 Notebook
Posted: September 10, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen 2 Comments »Picked up this awesome laptop/netbook hybrid called the Acer 1410 for $450 shipped and it arrived today. (Called the Acer 1810 in Europe.) Here’s some pictures:
It’s really thin and light for a laptop but more powerful than the average netbook (not to mention a full-size keyboard). It pack a Core 2 Solo (Penryn) processor rather than the typical Atom and has the new Intel integrated graphics with HDMI output!
I’ve pasted the exact specs below if your interested in that. What I’m happy for is that this will be a joy to bring to around in comparison to my heavy 15.4″ MacBook Pro, even if I don’t get to use Snow Leopard on it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Command Line Interface (CLI) Shortcut Keys
Posted: August 24, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen Leave a comment »Here’s a great list of command-line shortcuts you can use in a Linux terminal, thanks to MakeUseOf.
| Ctrl-a | Move to the start of the line. |
| Ctrl-e | Move to the end of the line. |
| Alt-] x | Moves the cursor forward to the next occurrence of x. |
| Alt-Ctrl-] x | Moves the cursor backwards to the previous occurrence of x. |
| Ctrl-u | Delete from the cursor to the beginning of the line. |
| Ctrl-k | Delete from the cursor to the end of the line. |
| Ctrl-w | Delete from the cursor to the start of the word. |
| Ctrl-y | Pastes text from the clipboard. |
| Ctrl-l | Clear the screen leaving the current line at the top of the screen. |
| Ctrl-x Ctrl-u | Undo the last changes. Ctrl-_ |
| Alt-r | Undo all changes to the line. |
| Alt-Ctrl-e | Expand command line. |
| Ctrl-r | Incremental reverse search of history. |
| Alt-p | Non-incremental reverse search of history. |
| !! | Execute last command in history |
| !abc | Execute last command in history beginning with abc |
| !n | Execute nth command in history |
| ^abc^xyz | Replace first occurrence of abc with xyz in last command and execute it |
Quotes from Slashdot
Posted: July 29, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen Leave a comment »You have a choice: you buy a product NOW, or you read the news: oh, there is a quad-GPU graphics card scheduled in 6 months. By the time it’s ready, you read again: there is another one with 64 GPU’s ready in one year. So, if your choice is to never be happy, don’t blame it on tech.
— alxtoth (914920)
The Ubuntu OS exceeds the Mac OS in Gibboniness, whereas Apple seems to have cornered the market on Leopardiness. The overall Toucaniness and Salamanderiness of the offerings is about the same.
— Kohath (38547)
Of course it’s a trap. Imagine you were walking along and you saw a bear trap on the ground, with a trip wire beside it leading to a gas canister. A cage is suspended over it by a rope, and there’s a sentry gun mounted nearby. You might think, “this is a trap”, unless you were a Novell executive, in which case you would step into the the apparatus try to find ways to “interoperate” with it.
— Experiment 626 (698257)
The Hidden Character
Posted: July 5, 2009 Filed under: NEZzen Leave a comment »Quite an interesting discovery I recently made: there is a hidden character code used to tell in a Unicode file which byte-order multibyte characters have. Basically the character is invisible (“zero-width and non-breaking”) to most editors, which is why it is sometimes useful for other things, such as floating an item to the top of a sorted list. The hex code of this invisible character is #FEFF or #FFFE and can be written in HTML using an escape sequence such as . Use with caution.
