Programming is more fun when you keep score. The extreme programming (XP) development model popularized the idea of test-driven development (TDD) with professional programmers in mind. But TDD turns o ...
I'm taking Stanford's Open Courseware "Programming Methodology" this semester, but I got stumped early on by the problem of setting up the special Stanford class libraries in my Debian-standard Eclips ...
In the past, I've always shied away from integrated development environments (IDEs), but I recently had a strong enough motivation to finally learn how to use Eclipse -- one of the most widely-used fr ...
A good backup system can help you recover from a lot of different kinds of situations: a botched upgrade (requiring re-installation), a hard drive crash, or even thumb-fingered users deleting the wron ...
There are a number of simple games I like to play when waiting for a package to download or compile. Often the available themes don't really suit me, and in any case I like to make themes or skins whe ...
Lately, the Falcon Programming Language has attracted growing interest and excited a deal of curiosity. In this article I'll document some unique features of Falcon that allow users to build easily wh ...
Some time ago I wrote an article about Jim Kent, an American biologist who used free and open software to race Craig Ventnor to the finishing line, sequencing the human genome. That was very big, cutt ...
In my last article about Xorg, I touched upon several points that have been in a state of continual flux in Xorg. Here's a follow-up on that article, as it seems to have generated quite a lot of inter ...
Over time, many people have complained about the X Window system; the X Window system, or Xorg in its current most popular implementation, is the layer between applications and the graphics adapter. I ...
The Falcon Programming Language is a typeless language born for rapid development, prototyping, and ready-made integration. We may also describe Falcon as a "scripting" language with features that ena ...
Need to connect to a Windows server from a computer running GNU/Linux? pyNeighborhood gives you an easy and graphical way to do just that. # Introduction Over the last several years, I've been trying ...
In the first part of this piece I introduced zenity : the handy tool for providing GUI interaction with your shell scripts. In this second part I'm going to delve a little deeper into the type of thin ...
I was browsing around my local Carphone Warehouse shop last week. Unlike the last time I crossed their threshold (November) I noticed that their Ubuntu netbook display had vanished. There was only one ...
Whilst an increasing number of recent converts are avoiding it (and I don't blame them really), the shell is still a key tool for the majority of GNU/Linux users. Shell scripts are knocked-up, shared ...
One of the cool things about custom distributions of GNU/Linux is that they usually have better "eye-candy". However, it's not really that hard to provide your own. If you are setting up a multiple bo ...
This last Christmas, I refurbished and installed computers for two of my children. As we still have a pile of old games in a drawer, I wanted to provide multi-boot systems. This was much easier and mo ...
I've been using Fedora (Core and all) on and off for a few years now and its parsimonious attitudes to codecs notwithstanding, the thing that always reduces me to a whimpering, pleading wreck is watch ...
A long time ago, on a blog post not that far away... I once wrote an article on Xvid 1.1.3, and the speed boost one could get by enabling assembly-optimized code. Well, this is a case of my being hois ...
Many systems support video upload and viewing functionality. Of course, all video files uploaded by users shall be converted to some common format (flv format as usual) to make playback easier, probab ...
Mention Jimmy Wales and you automatically think Wikipedia; however, that is not his only love child. The Wikia search engine is his latest offspring -- or least it was when it was launched in January ...