I'm trying to prevent bash from saving duplicate commands to my history. Here's what I've got: shopt -s histappend export HISTIGNORE='&:ls:cd ~:cd ..:[bf]g:exit:h:history' export HISTCONTROL=erasedups export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' This works fine while I'm logged in and .bash_history is in memory. For example: $ history 1 vi...
I started using PHP for creating online database driven applications in 1998. Back then, PHP 3 was the state of the art for web development. In the following years I've written a whole bunch of applications and a self-tailored framework for content management and document archiving (which I'm sure is ridiculous compared to solutions that...
It seems that there are no way to do that in P4V. I can use 'Submitted Changelist'and but it's quite cumbersome and there I can only search by User & Workspace. I'd like to search the history by description. Is there any easy way to do that? ...
For the purpose of this question, let's define a dead programming language as one for which you cannot buy a newly manufactured piece of hardware and install an operating system which will let you run a compiler or interpreter for your language, without requiring an emulator. Thus, assembly language for any architecture which isn't curr...
Alan Kay was quoted several years ago to the effect that there had been only three new things in software in the preceding 20 years (effectively the lifespan of PCs). One of them was Spreadsheets. Does anyone remember the other two? (EDIT: Who is Alan Kay (a few may ask.) His work at Xerox Parc arguably did more to shape our current so...
Maybe it is not directly programming related question, but anyway. Is there a book you can recommend, covering some history of business software with kind of a big picture of how the field originated and went trough its evolution to become what it is today? I don't mean the history of software development, but the history of business so...
I just read Joel Spolsky's article, Up the tata without a tutu, where Joel says, In those days, there were no application servers. and There really weren't any other app servers in those days. So basically, how did people write web apps in those days? Did they write their own implementations of web servers and app servers...
I created an admin page for a web application, and it's mostly ajax. Almost all the events in the page update one of the UpdatePanels on the page. How can I save each UpdatePanel state in the user's history so when the user pushes the browser "back" button they wont get redirected to the login screen ? ...
What is classpath hell and is/was it really a problem for Java? ...
I've seen the term "baller" used in a couple of C++ interview tests. It means "pointer" as best as I can tell from questions like "Describe the difference between a baller and a reference." I thought that perhaps it was an Indian term due to some Google deduction, but a couple of Indian co-workers who went to school in India said they've...
Throughout the history of software development, it sometimes happens that some person (usually unknown, probably unwittingly) made what, at the time, seemed a trivial, short-term decision that changed the world of programming. What events of this nature come to mind, and what have been our industry's response to mitigate the pain? Illus...
Perhaps you know the story of HTTP and HTML being developed on a NeXT computer. I am curious which platform served as the first home for these programming languages: Ada C C++ C# D Erlang Fortran Haskell Java Javscript Lisp Logo MATLAB ML Perl PHP Prolog Python R Ruby Scheme SQL Smalltalk I thought it might be interesting to reflect ...
In Unix the ^ allows you to repeat a command with some text substituted for new text. For example: csh% grep "stuff" file1 >> Results grep "stuff" file1 csh% ^file1^file2^ grep "stuff" file2 csh% Is there a Vim equivalent? There are a lot of times I find myself editing minor things on the command line over and over again. ...
Question: For typed in commands invoked via M-x I am having difficulty understanding how Emacs allows recalling and rerunning the commands. The command-history works quite differently from Vim. It puts the commands in a buffer rather than the "minibuffer". Is there a way to get something similar to Vim's approach (i.e., previously typed...
Where did the term "caret" originate for a text insertion point? I've tried to google for it, but this is something difficult to locate (even my historic computer reference books don't seem to help here). I'm reasonably sure I remember some archaic Wang/mainframe apps that used a literal caret (ie: ^) as a text insertion mark, but I co...
Computer science and programming is a field with a relatively short history but it is developing very rapidly. Is there a repository for existing historical software or somewhere that I could submit software of historical interest? I've asked this, and answered using the standard SO paradigm, because I thought it would be of general in...
C++ offers three floating point types: float, double, and long double. I infrequently use floating-point in my code, but when I do, I'm always caught out by warnings on innocuous lines like float PiForSquares = 4.0; The problem is that the literal 4.0 is a double, not a float - Which is irritating. For integer types, we have short in...
I'm using an iframe to display content that has links. When the user clicks around in the iFrame and hits "back," it goes back in the iFrame. This behavior is OK. However, once they're back to the first page of the iFrame and they hit "back" again, the entire window is taken back to the previous page. This is unwanted. To prevent th...
Hi, this is more a question about programming culture and history. I do web development, and my girlfriend's father used to do software dev from the 60s through the 90s. He doesn't seem that connected to the industry now, and isn't really forthcoming about his experience or work; we get along fine in general but I'd like to draw him ou...
There are a variety of characters that are not legally encodeable in XML, e.g. U+0007 ('bell') and U+001B ('escape'). Most of the interesting ones are non-whitespace 'control' characters. It's clear from (e.g.) this question and others that it's the XML spec that's the issue -- but can anyone illuminate me as to why the XML spec forbi...