Sindisil

I respectfully disagree, or partially, anyway.

I've been developing software in Vim, Netbeans, and Visual Studio (with about a year or so of Eclipse thrown in for good measure).

I've worked on projects in all three ranging from tiny 1kloc one-offs to several million line systems, using C, C++, Java, Bash, and a smattering of Perl and Python.

For Java and C++ code bases beyond a few thousand lines, I certainly agree that language aware tools are invaluable. It's sad that C++'s nature makes such tools so difficult to build. Going from Netbeans/Java to Netbeans or VS C++ is like going back in time - not quite laser scalpel to flint knife, but sometimes it feels like it!

Fortunately, I spend the bulk of my time in C, where I find myself at least as effective in Vim as in either Netbeans or VS. Granted, I obviously do use a few additional tools - primarily ctags and make.

If vim only had fully language aware navigation and search, I think I'd be just as effective in it as in any IDE. Exuberant ctags comes close, but just isn't quite there, and cscope is just too clumsy and slow.

I'm not sure of your definition of "proper search", but bing seems to have a reasonably flexible search syntax (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795667.aspx).

I'm personally going to give it and DDG a try over the next couple weeks, just in case either is currently significantly better for tech related searches.

So far Duck Duck Go is looking like a potential win.

bing, perhaps?

I intend to give it a shot. Seems there's some reasonably powerful query syntax: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795667.aspx.

Thanks for doing this.

Sure, though in interests of full disclosure, on a large screen the menu bar is actually "a mile high, and a mile away". Still, global menu on the Mac is probably still at least a wash for all but the most expansive desktops.

With Unity, though, the global menu bar on a large desktop is "a mile high, a mile away, and invisible". You get to guess where you should be aiming.

Are you really arguing that hitting a target you can't see is easier than a target you can see?

All that said, I do prefer Unity over other options on my netbook. The savings in real estate is well worth the marginal cost in usability. I don't use the menu bar much, anyway.

That last bit is probably Unity's saving grace: most apps used by most people are no longer designed with the menus as the primary interface.

Since they're less used, it makes sense to optimize screen use by tucking them away at the top of the screen.

I wouldn't at all mind if the menu bar had an auto-hide mode, though. Actually, what I'd like is a partial auto-hide. Tuck away over to the top left, with only the window widgets and the indicators showing. I'd gain a line or two in any editor or term on the right side of the screen.

Damn.

That hit me harder than I would have thought possible.

The family of man is poorer for his passing, regardless of how few may know why.

Wow. I don't know if I'm at a loss for words, or have too much to say, but I'm really having a hard time putting my thoughts into a brief post.

Rest in peace, dmr.

I'm not what you would call a Gruber fan, but this is a beautiful and inspiring piece of writing.

Apple, and thus Jobs, has always been "them" to me. With the exception of the CoCo way back in the day, I've never been much of a fanboy, but my computer affiliations have always been with something other than Apple: CBM PET, COSMAC Elf, CoCo I/II/III, Amiga, Dos, Windows, Linux - always something else.

But in all that time, I always felt that, over rated and over hyped as they might be, Apple and Jobs we worth of respect and admiration, most especially for their inspiration.

Inspiration inward, in the sense of invention, discovery, and art.

Inspiration outward, in the sense of leadership, drive, and motivation.

Somehow, a kernel of that inspiration is expressed by this vignette.

Very, very classy.

The one feature gReader is missing, which may drive me to an alternative, is the ability to chose a set of items to mark as read.

I can "mark all as read", of course, but I'd like to be able to eliminate items I can tell from the title are not of immediate interest.

We use sqlite, as well as MS, PostgresSQL & MySQL.

Yup. The quasi-official policy at some places I've worked is that engineers are not to browse the patent database, for exactly that reason.

Ironic, given one of the original primary reasons for the patent system.

Of course, the "right" tool for a job might, and often does, vary from craftsman to craftsman.

It probably wouldn't be "craft" were that not the case.

Oh, for the love of Pete.

I use namecheap for all my domains, but this sort of pandering crap may well be enough for me to transfer everything elsewhere. Don't know if I'm willing to use godaddy or not, but I must may.

I use Ubuntu (10.10) almost full time on my personal machines, and am part of a movement toward Ubuntu at my day job (from RHEL5.1), where I use Linux between 25 & 100 percent of the time, depending upon the projects I'm working on in a given period.

10.10 is most of the way there, and, if all the panels and launchers properly auto-hide in 11.4, I have hope that it will only add polish. Great job so far!

That said, I have a gripes and wishes (which I may post about later, if I have time), but my single greatest annoyance is quite simple really: the window manager has no option to keep focus from being stolen.

I know that both Gnome and Canonical are allergic to options, which is indeed the best default stance from a UX standpoint. However, this is right up there with mouse activated window focus behavior, which you do have an option for.

Especially on my netbook, where I'm running many apps full screen and process startup is relatively slow, I rage every time I start a couple programs, start working in the first that comes up, then get pulled away to some f'ing trivial dialog in the next, losing keystrokes. Worse, occasionally dismissing a dialog I didn't intend to.

I know that apps can be written to be less rude, but part of the beauty of *nix windowing is that the window manager gets the final say, so even rude apps can, at best, whine a bit (i.e. blink their window header and/or their button in the window list panel widget.

Two hours on a netbook? Seriously?

My NC-10 is getting long in the tooth on its original 6-cell battery, but it still gets 4.5-6 hours, depending upon what I'm doing, and I seldom (read "almost never") remember to turn off wifi, which is a major power suck.

I agree. I'd love to hear of a readily available font that has similar feel.

In games, I occasionally use a font called Galette Medium, but it has a decidedly different feel.

Sadly, some blogs have begun to rely on RSS functionality in the browser, and don't place an RSS link visibly on the page. That makes it rather difficult to subscribe.

I don't suppose there's any chance we can send it back?

It's really less complex than it appears, especially once you grok that switch/case is just a computed goto; cases are just labels.

So, the idea behind Duff's Device is just to unroll a loop, dealing in an elegant (some would say abhorrent - they're wrong) way with the "leftover" portion.

So, the canonical Duff's is copying shorts, with the copy loop unrolled to eight copy statements inside the loop. If you want to copy, say 47 shorts, the loop would need to iterate five times, and there would be seven shorts left to copy.

Duff's uses the switch to jump into the middle of the loop just far enough to copy those seven leftover shorts (47 % 8 = 7). The do-while then proceeds to run through the five full iterations.

Modern compilers will do that for you now, though there are still applications for similar code.

Hope that helps.

Looks very nice, but two things keep it from being a contender for my next portable purchase:

1. Glossy screen. That's a show-stopper. The whole point of a portable for me is that it is usable wherever I am, not that I can take it to where it might be usable.

2. Price. $999 is not that bad for what you get, but it pales in absolute terms to current netbook prices. And said netbooks are available with matte screens. They also usually have 3 USB ports (though I seldom use more than 2).

Still and all, very nice.

Eating some oatmeal right now, actually.

Here in Minnesota, USA, warm cereals (primarily oatmeal, Malt-o-meal and Cream of Wheat) are very popular in the colder months (September through April or May, most years).

They also rock when you're sick, especially with a sore throat (as I am today).

However, I almost always cook mine on the stove top, not in the microwave.

Wrong.

There are several free (and open source) tools for creating flash content.

No, unless it runs on iP* OS.

Works well overall, but the damn toolbar is fixed width, so it gets clipped when the browser window is smaller than 1024 wide, which is lame.

Great quote:

"Even though we're a pure cork company, my motto is you sell what your customer wants and not what you want to sell..."

That is incorrect.

They used place that restriction on those accessing the .swf spec, but that restriction has been lifted. I'd have to check, but I think it's been several years now, but it's certainly been more than a year.

Very nice.

I love the idea of "native" browser games. Sadly, even with the neat new things coming in HTML5 & CSS3, there will be big things missing.

Highest on my list is decent sound support. Needing to provide both mp3 & ogg (since different browsers support different sound file formats), suboptimal support for mixing, and lack of decent programmatic control of panning or channel volume all stand out as significant deficiencies, especially as compared to Flash.

Still and all, it's obvious that it's worth pursuing native browser games. Even without the sound support, there are a fair number of compelling games that could be done. Users often don't want the sound on in the browser games, anyway. Still, it makes the split between browser games and stand alone games wider than it needs to be, IMHO.

"almost crashed Chrome"?

Yes you can.

The compiler is free and open (http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK).

That, an editor, and Bob's your uncle.

On Windows, there's also a nice open source IDE (http://flashdevelop.org).

The one thing that's not open source is the player, and that is free.

Looks like they paid some attention to what they did wrong in their previous updates.

One hopes that represents real education, not just real PR.