gedit is awesome. Lightweight, with an excellent plugin ecosystem. It is a text editor. Not an IDE. Not a programming environment. All it does it text. That is a Good Thing™. With a few small tweaks, gedit will do LaTeX, C, C#, Haskell, or any other text-based thing you want to do. It embodies the read more
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Improved Allman Style
August 13, 2011 – 22:35
C-Based languages are those with “Brace” syntax describing blocks. Since the first C programming texts, there has been something of a holy war between zealots of different standards. Being an exemplar of the programming virtue of hubris, I have my entry. Allman-style bracing is the correct, best form for indenting block level code, provided a read more
CSS Written Right
August 13, 2011 – 22:10
I have never seen a large CSS file that I thought was maintainable. In programming languages, we use indentation exhaustively to provide visual cues of related blocks of code. Unfortunately, CSS is often a giant wall of text, with all selectors at col 0 and all properties starting 1 tab deep. Instead, CSS blocks should read more
HTML Coding Standards
August 13, 2011 – 22:03
Doctype <!DOCTYPE html> In the age of HTML5, this is all you need, and it’s a full 2/3s the length of an html4 transitional DOCTYPE. html No xmlns You’re writing html5. Even in xhtml, when’s the last time you needed to embed an alternative xmlns in your docs? (If you’re working on a project that read more
General Rules for Program Source Files
August 13, 2011 – 21:55
General Do not wrap lines of code. If a line starts getting longer than 79 characters, it should be refactored. Narrow screens are still not uncommon. Many programmers have toolbars and other windows taking up the sides of the screen. The human field of vision still needs to scan vertically. 80 is still the magic number read more
Why is time special?
August 12, 2011 – 09:17
In Special Relativity, the spacetime interval between two events is giving the Minkowski metric . What is the justification for making time have a negative coefficient, and how closely is that related to the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Sure, by letting , we get a pretty boring spacetime, and the boosts in the Poincaré group read more
Particle Indistinguishability Scale Limit
August 10, 2011 – 23:14
QFT says that all particles are indistinguishable from one-another [1]. That is, take a proton from cosmic ray from a supernova a billion light-yeas away, and compare it to a proton that just got smashed out in the LHC, and they are indistinguishable from one-another. Replace either with the other, and nothing will change. (As read more
Verbal Shell
August 5, 2011 – 02:36
I think it’s time for an attempt at an auditory shell, a la Star Trek: The Next Generation. “Computer<pause>” – The shell knows the next phrase is going to be a command for it, not background conversation “What is the current accepted value of the gravitational constant?” “The value of the gravitational constant is six read more
Software Craftsmanship Workbooks
August 1, 2011 – 17:05
Like any skill, software craftsmanship takes practice. Because there are so many programming languages available, and each has something unique to offer, I’ve broken the programming exercises in the book out into separate workbooks. Each workbook follows the main text, providing programming tutorials that cover the main concepts in a specific language. I am writing read more
Software Craftsmanship
August 1, 2011 – 01:53
I’m writing a book! I have a degree in computer science, but that’s really not what I do. I am a software developer, which focuses on a rather different aspect of computers and programming than what most computer science degrees offer. In my undergraduate work, there were maybe a half-dozen group assignments in the entire read more