During the day I like to listen to various audio streams so I find myself switching back and forth between music and news. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could play streams for a given amount of time? I couldn’t find anything that did it automatically so I wrote this quick Python program to do [...]
I like to tell stories about poorly written code. As a programmer you come across it all the time, and good programmers work really hard to make sure everything they write is both clean and as free from bugs as you can make it. There is a reason, though, that we spend so much time [...]
I haven’t written about procan in a while but I have been quietly working on it in the background. This release brings UI improvements, namely an ncurses interface as well as some other small performance improvements and optimizations. If you are not aware of it, ProcAn is an adaptive process analysis tool meant to [...]
Today I thought I would write a little about Haskell. This year I decided to learn this language and revisit the world of functional programming. After spending a month with it there are things that I understand much better, but I’d be lying if I said it was easy. In order to learn Haskell, [...]
Several months ago I posted a C function that will fetch the console screen dimensions for both Windows and Unix. Actually… there were two functions, one for the width and one for the height. I left it as an exercise for the reader to come up with the better implementation. I decided that I would [...]
After having heard about it for a while from some very respected sources I decided to give Ruby a try. I had heard that it had a very similar feel to Python. After using it for a weekend I can really agree with that statement. It really is no more or less powerfull than Python, nor [...]
There’s a project that I’ve been helping out on lately. Headed up by Meethune and Schick. Check it out here: https://rssnewzbin.mercymachines.mine.nu It’s a Python program for Linux/BSD that uses saved Newzbin searches and Hellanzb to automatically download new releases based on the search criteria.
When tools that you depend on to work exactly as expected fail it can create a lot of frustration as well as losttime. If you are a tool author you go to great lengths to ensure that it behaves exactly as the user would expect it but you can’t always catch every small bug and [...]
When I started school at the University of Southern Mississippi I was required to take an introductory programming class. Now I never did so well in college…. in fact, I did terrible and part of the reason is that if I’m not interested in something or I can’t derive some interest from the topic at [...]