I'm looking for some videos about the history of Unix/Linux and Open Source Software. I know (and have) Revolution OS. Are there any others? Edit: I'm a teacher and need resources to show students. Edit: I found Revolution OS on Google Video. ...
The reverse-i-search facility in bash is useful, but it is unlike most other bash commands in that it seems to be bound to a keybinding (Ctrl-R). How can a user trigger this facility using an alias or typed-in command instead? ...
Cocoa provides for page-aligned memory areas that it calls Memory Zones, and provides a few memory management functions that take a zone as an argument. Let's assume you need to allocate a block of memory (not for an object, but for arbitrary data). If you call malloc(size), the buffer will always be allocated in the default zone. Howev...
I vaguely remember that in the early days of the browser, one notion of what hypertext could be used for was a "zoom in" detail for academic essays: if you wanted a brief overview, you'd take the outermost level, and if you wanted to delve, you would click something and more sentences would appear. I know this sounds trivial and now, bu...
This is the only product that I know that a consumer must agree to something that only lawyer can (something) understand. I'm sure car accidents kill more people each year than software accidents. But I don't sign anything like an EULA when I buy a car. So why does software have EULA? Were there a bad accident that triggered the need f...
I need a solution for the page refresh and the back button when using AJAX. I'm using simple javascript for the AJAX implementation. If anybody could send a code snippet I would be very grateful. ...
'Hello world' is the usually the first example for any programming language. I've always wondered where this sentence came from, where was it first used. I've once been told that it was the first sentence ever to be displayed on a computer screen. but I've not been able to find any reference to this. So my question is: Where does the p...
Over the years we have seen (well, I have :) a number of languages come and go. Some were more accepted, some a little less. So I was wondering, what do you think are factors which most impact whether the language survives ? And whether it will have a future for a number of years (by that I mean several decades or so) ? For example, for...
As you've often heard, those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. Not wanting to be doomed to repeat history, What are the valuable lessons of the history of our craft? How does the working programmer most efficiently go about learning them, and keeping their understanding current? In particular, how does the young p...
I have been programming for 20 years. Many things changed since I wrote my first BASIC lines. Now we have IDEs, frameworks, debuggers, profilers, versioning tools and many other helpful toys. So which developments in the past 10 years have made programming easier? And what was necessary to sacrifice for it? ...
Scenario: You are doing your daily Bash shell stuff. You want to run a previous command so you type: history | grep foocommand Then you get a list of all the foocommand stuff you did for however long your history has kept track, in a list like so: 585 foocommand --baz --bleet 750 foocommand | grep quux 987 history grep | fooco...
I was re-reading Joel's Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg problems and came across this fun quote: In fact, WordStar was ported to DOS by changing one single byte in the code. (Real Programmers can tell you what that byte was, I've long since forgotten). I couldn't find any other references to this with a quick Google se...
I need to provide our clients with a dump of a single sub directory in our SVN repository along with the revision history if possible. I know that you can do a dump but I don't believe you can tell it to isolate a single sub directory in the repo. If I export i'll only get the head or a single revision, this is not what I need. Is there ...
Does anyone have an idea why the ampersand was chosen as the way to denote references in C++? AFAIK (though I don't have the book near me), Stroustroup didn't explain that choice, which I find a little odd because the same symbol was already used for address-of in C. ...
I try to copy a command from history. How can I copy the 510th command? Please, see the data below. My bet is: history | grep 510 | sed '1q;d' | awk '{print $2-$10}' | pbcopy but the output is 0. I cannot understand the reason. What is wrong in the command? 505 find . -perm=750 -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 750 506 find . --perm=750...
When did Java first get a JIT compiler for production code? ...
It seems probable our client will cancel the project we've been working on for 15 months. It's possible (although not very likely) that it will get restarted at some point. We've also extended our company's product in several areas while doing this. Other project teams may need to make similar extensions, and we'd like them to be able...
I assume everyone here is familiar with the adage that all text files should end with a newline. I've known of this "rule" for years but I've always wondered — why? ...
There is a version (popularised by Joel Spolsky) attributing the demise of WordPerfect to a refusal of its programmers to use anything but assembler that led to delay of the first WPwin release and as result eventually to losing the all important battle with Microsoft. There are a few references to programming work being done using asse...
Since its possibly one of the most widely used methods of the Java language, why does it have to accept an array of Strings and doesn't work without it? For example, I could always live with: public static void main() {} over public static void main(String[] args) {} Is there a higher purpose to this than just being able to accept ...