Saturday, June 15, 2002
Shutdown
Right, if Patrick can do it, so can I.
I've installed Movable Type and this page will no longer be updated.
The new page for Andrew Channels ... is here. See you on the other side.
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
Technology - its great, innit
A great piece on Boing Boing today describing a talk that Howard Rheingold gave. Go and read it, the man is right slap bang on the money.
Mental note to self: Go and read more from Howard Rheingold and Doug Englebart.
Monday, June 03, 2002
Revolution
Courtesy of Accordion Guy, a poster to let you know that the party is interested in your choice of programming language.
Friday, May 31, 2002
Language Comparisons
I won't be the last (or the first) person to point to Paul Prescod's comparison of Python and Lisp but if you haven't read it yet may I heartily recommend it to you.
A wise and valued colleague once suggested to me that good programmers should learn a new language every year. That way they can absorb all of the good, and bad, points in the language and improve their skills.
I'm personally running at about one language every ten years, but the discussion between Paul's Prescod and Graham has got me resolved to spread my wings a little. As soon as I've pared down my to-do list a little I think its time to explore scheme and maybe even squeak. If it doesn't make me a better person I'll let you know.
Thursday, May 30, 2002
This is not a tech news site, but ...
This is cool. When I worked in a defunct dot com (before it was defunct) the limiting factor for our VoIP network was that there had to be a piece of our kit at each end of every call. ENUM solves that dilemma by making any internet connected entity addressable.
Which, to the unitiated, means you will be able to call me (eventually) by dialling "phone.halfcooked.com"
Vim
Today's top Vim tip. To escape special characters in vi you prefixed them with ^v (that is ctrl-v to all of you Windows users ;-) This doesn't work in Vim because ctrl-v is the now ubiqituous short cut for 'paste'. To escape a special character in Vim use ^q (ctrl-q). Sweet. As an example, if you have an SQL select statement and you would like each column in the select clause on a separate line, just type :s/, /,<ctrl-q><ctrl-m>/g and Bob will be your Auntie's live in lover.
Oh, and to be fair to the emacsen I almost installed it that other editor on my machine at work today. When you finally get to the download page at http://www.xemacs.org/ (hint, it is at the stunningly obvious URL of http://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/binaries/wind32/installshield/) the Windows installer is 23.3Mb - do you have any idea how long that takes to download over a 56k line? Maybe another time.
Saturday, May 25, 2002
A Slight Diversion
I'd just like to take a break from our scheduled coverage to wish Mark Pilgrim a happy 29.5 birthday. Keep up the good work Mark, but twenty nine and a half? Really.
