You don't have to mess with the internals, unless you want to put a bomb in someone's laptop. Reboot in single user mode, change password, do whatever you want.
I saw Zed mention the same title on his blog once. His idea was to provide something for programmers with experience in other languages and some basic knowledge of C. As I fit in that category, I'd like to see something beyond K&R. Especially some stuff on organizing modern projects written in C, makefiles etc.
Agreed. The UI of Skype 5 for windows is bloated and confusing, but the 5.0 version for mac kept things simple while pimping up the looks and adding some features, so it doesn't resemble the latest windows version much. So a new version for Linux may not be just about making the UI more confusing.
Suse has a system configuration utility called YAST which is user friendly for people who are afraid of the command line and also works across a text terminal like ssh. You can configure the network, manage packages, configure the firewall etc. all from within YAST. In the previous place I worked at the only reason for using SUSE was YAST, because the guy who was in charge of the servers was afraid of the Linux command line.
Mandriva comes with a lot of proprietary drivers that just work. Plus it is very friendly for people coming from Windows. For example I've used Mandriva a lot on my Nokia booklet 3G because it works with GMA 500.
>> Maybe someone who has developed a FF extension can lay my worries to rest -- could this have, say, a built in key logger which sends that data to the author?
If it could sniff packets on network interfaces why couldn't it send data to a website? ;)
This kind of FF plugin requires extensive C++ coding. But even simple plugins that are only JS could easily send your username and password (if entered within them) to any web server.
I'm sure all those keyboards do wonders for him. Although people writing stuff like this should take into consideration that a 7Kg (15 lbs) $150+ keyboard that you can only order by mail sounds like elitist BS to some people, especially in some parts of the world. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that most of those keyboards ship only in the US, Japan and 4 other countries.
Somewhere in the links he provided there was a comment that went like "If you're a taxi driver how important is your ability to drive". Now what Jeff does is tell us all taxi drivers that we're probably driving a '99 honda civic while he drives and prefers his ferraris and vintage porches. And driving those kinds of cars makes him a more effective driver.
If you want a decent keyboarding experience without breaking the bank the Logitech illuminated is an excellent scissors switch keyboard. You can be pretty sure it won't degrade after 2+ years of heavy use.
A versatile mechanical keyboard that according to some is even better then DAS (and much more easy to find) is the Black Widow from Razer.
> an ASP.NET developer is more likely to cross shop something like Java; pick a framework, any framework.
In my opinion, an ASP.NET developer is more likely to cross shop with whatever next technology is marketed by MS or whatever the company they have been working for decides to switch to (be it Java or whatever).
A Ruby, Python, PHP [Name your OSS language/platform] developer is much more likely to switch to Java (maybe not the language, but the platform) than any .Net developer ever would be.
Given that that I installed the RC Desktop this morning and there were massive problems with Compiz not working even with the latest beta driver from Nvidia and Skype crashing even in LXDE I'll continue to run 10.04 for at least a few weeks.
I stopped reading whole books about specific language or technology 5 years ago. But sometimes do buy them to look into a couple of chapters when needed. These kind of books I usually acquire in electronic form as they are easier to use as a reference that way. Plus they tend to get old in a couple of years at which point they'd only serve to gather dust.
Last book about a specific language I read from cover to cover was "Expert Python Programming" which is more about best practices, testing and packaging etc.
I feel I learn much more by looking at source code then reading books or tutorials on something.
Books like "Patterns of enterprise application architecture", "Programming collective intelligence", "RESTful Web Services" etc. I do buy and read from cover to cover at least once every quarter.
We migrated our old 1GB RAM slicehost VPS to 2 1GB RAM Rackspace servers. The performance/stability remains the same as they are on the same hardware as I understand. So it's all great. The reason for migrating was we used a small fraction of the bandwidth provided with the slicehost plan, so as rackspace charges by GB of bandwidth we only pay 15% more for double the performance with our current bandwidth usage.
Linode plans look cheap compared to rackspace or slicehost. My problem is that I've tried too many oversold VPS hosts in the past that had very slugish performance. So I've never considered moving to anything outside of rackspace servers.
If he couldn't care less about his code being pythonic or not why does he bother ranting about it?
BTW, before loosing it's meaning pythonic didn't mean reinventing the wheel. And every other PHP/JQuery script kiddie picking up python these days uses the term pythonic freely after writing their first url shortener based on Django when they've found out they could do stupid things with special methods that seem cool coming from PHP.
Isn't that painting millions of X programmers with the same brush?