Nice review of Linux Programming By Example on slashdot today. The book goes through the source of the Unix V7 code for the ls program. The second part then delves into processes, etc. I have a similar book at home, Linux Application Development which is quite an old one, but a good book overall. It also covers the make utility in the beginning which I think the Example book should have covered as well.

The author of the review linked to a good article on how there are so many ‘Teach Yourself in 24 hours’ or ‘21 days’ books out there these days. It does indeed take a long time to learn to program well. You have to make a lot of mistakes, fix them, across multiple languages and generally it does take you several years of exposure to become a competent programmer. I do suppose that if you already know 10 languages, you should be able to pick the next one up in 2 weeks or so? I suppose these books do fill that niche.

Had a great day today. Fixed a major networking-related issue at work which prevented us from accessing some site. I was really pleased I finally fixed that. I’ve also been using Netbeans for some time now and the latest 3.6 is quite good for interface design. I’m using the Mac version and the one thing I really like about it is the ability to instantly preview the interface A lot of other interface designers have been doing this for ages (e.g QT Designer) and it’s about time I saw this in Java

I also spent some time yesterday downgrading my firewall from Debian unstable to stable Despite all the stuff you’ll find after googling about ‘Downgrading is NOT supported!’ I found that its actually not that difficult at all. The best discussion of this I found that helped is here

A lot of discussion these days about A9, Amazon’s new search engine. It allows you to do a web search, book search and look at your search history from what I’ve seen so far. You do need to log in first though. A lot of people are worried about the privacy implications of this, as this allows Amazon to build a pretty accurate picture of what people are searching for and buying. I suppose in the end this is good for the consumer, but still worrying for some people.

Similar privacy concerns have surfaced around Google’s new Gmail webmail system. I simply cannot see why anyone would want to store a Gig of their mail somewhere! I subscribe to many mailing-lists and do have some folders that are megabytes in size, but a gig is just too much, and what if the system is compromised somehow? That’s a lot of my personal life in someone else’s hands. More from jeremy on the issue here

Something really really bizarre just happened today with apache on my web server. When I posted to my blog with NetNewsWire, only half the entries appeared and then stuff started randomly disappearing.

So I just did a *huge* dist-upgrade and things seem to be working better. The slashdot and serverside feeds don’t seem to be working for some reason. That’s a lesson for using debian unstable on a server. I wish it was as easy to go back to stable as it is to go ‘up’ to unstable
It’s been a technologically bad day, but things are looking up. I spent the whole morning wrestling with cabling and networking issues. I got up early to go to the gym and ended up trying to fix the network for nearly 2 hours … grr.. Part of the problem is my ADSL router, which badly needs a firmware update, which I’m reluctant to do as it works nicely most of the time and I don’t want to mess things up

Instead of trying to painfully compile GNOME 2.6 on the poor laptop, I very unwillingly decided that I should install linux on a separate partition on my mac and dual-boot between OS X and Linux. I installed Yellow Dog on my mac and I must say I have never seen linux run so fast! It logs into X, gdm and even the GNOME desktop literally in seconds! It’s brilliant! Even my 1.4 Ghz Athlon isn’t so fast.

There had to be a catch, of course. The fans on Macs seem to be almost always software controlled, so under the Linux the fans kick in and start revving up and down in cycles every few seconds. It’s extremely annoying and will be the first thing I fix as soon as I can.

The good thing is that OS X gives me so much choice. I can run X11 under OS X and run KDE/GNOME etc if I wish to. I can also install Linux under Virtual PC, and depending on the app, I might be able to compile/link it directly against OS X itself! I love this flexibility.

I need to get a new laptop badly as my current one is way overdue for an upgrade. It’s more than 3 years old now and I keep trying to put new linux distros on it by mistake I loaded Fedora Core 2 on it, which almost killed the poor thing. It’s now been through VectorLinux and it’s finally on Debian unstable now. Unstable because I’m trying to get the shiny new GNOME 2.6 running on it so I’ve been compiling it all weekend! In any case, it hasn’t built yet so I finally gave up and am now building it on a faster machine and am hoping to transfer the binaries across to the laptop so I can finally do some development work.

I’m resisting the temptation to buy second-hand as I have already been burned once on ebay and I will never again buy a laptop without checking it out thoroughly first-hand. Dell and IBM and even Compaq are candidates so far, but I may have to go for the Dell as my budget is pretty tight. I have to admit the IBM X Series models are the ones I really fancy as they are so slim and ultra-portable.