Kathy Sierra’s Don’t Make the Demo Look Done provides excellent advice for conveying the state of a project while presenting the project’s functionality. It also discusses advantages such as improved user feedback. With a very rough presentation, users will be comfortable providing inputs on significant system features rather than the particular fonts used in the […]
The Linux User’s Manual page states, “The iostat command is used for monitoring system input/output device loading by observing the time the devices are active in relation to their average transfer rates.” The page continues, “The iostat command generates reports that can be used to change system configuration to better blaance the input/output load between […]
Today, I caught myself doing this: bool f() { bool r; if( x == y ) { r = true; } else { r = false; } return r; } When I really should have written: bool f() { return x == y; } In the actual code I that I was writing, x and […]
Everyday is an opportunity to learn something new. Today, I learned how to set the tab width for vi (set tabstop=2) while trying to format the picture for this blog entry, for example. Daily learning is a form of personal refinement. Accumulated knowledge allows people to do things better. If the lesson relates to development, […]
I just finished rereading Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. As a little experiment, I will explore how far I can get with the book’s fundamental design patterns with Python, an object-oriented scripting language that I am trying to pick up. One of the first design patterns I came across even before reading DP […]