Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Best Software Essays of 2004

Joel on Software has this post which mentions preparation of a new book that will include all the best essays about software written in 2004. The essays will be both from online and printed resources. There is a discussion where everyone can promote this and that essay.

You can use this discussion to locate good essays and read them. This way you can: a) save money on the book (unless yo prefer printed pages to online versions) and b) read more good esseys than they will be able to get into the book. Of course, if you know of some essey that wasn’t mentioned in the discussion, please let them know.

What file extension are you?

SWFI came across yet another one useless and irrelevant quiz. It asks you about 20 questions and by the answers provided it determines which file extension reflects your personality in the best way. Take it – it is fun. My result is SWF (which is the file extension of Macromedia Flash files). The description of the result is:

You are .swf. You are flashy, but lack substance. You like playing, but often you are annoying. Grow up.

The two questions I have now are: am I happy with the result and should I beleive the results. :)

MIT OpenCourseWare

There is a saying that goes something like: all new is just forgotten old. Sometimes it is very useful to go through old news and refresh your memory. There are things which were not important before but are now. There are things that you skipped accidentally. There are things that passed the edge of your memory.

I’ve mentioned MIT OpenCourseWare, I think, to everyone I know. Moreover, I did it several times. For those who still don’t what I am talking about – MIT OpenCourseWare is an effort of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make all its study materials available for the general public free of charge and in open formats. They have started with this program several years ago and they are following the plan until now.

Here is a quote for you from their recent mailing.

How Big is the MIT OCW Web Site?

The MIT OCW Web site now offers free and open access to 914 courses, ranging from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT schools — Architecture and Planning,Engineering, Science, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Sloan School of Management. With more than 900 courses available, users frequently ask, “Just how much educational content is really available on the MIT OCW Web site?”

MIT OCW is a content-rich Web site that is 48 gigabytes in size; offering courses that contain 14,717 HTML pages, 15,640 unique PDF documents, and 16,078 images — overall 55,171 total files for use by MIT’s global audience. All of this is made available through the generosity of 536 MIT faculty, with many more signed on for future publication cycles.

Worth checking out – don’t you think?

Programming Assignment Guide For CS Students

Today’s article – “Programming Assignment Guide For CS Students” – at Slashdot started an interesting discussion. There are comments with links to other common mistakes, guides to programming in general and different programming languages in particular. People share their experiences, tricks and tips. There are even talks on the subject of programming while intoxicated by alcohol (or anything else for that matter).

Shaping up KDE all the way

I think that by now everyone who touched KDE can pretty much figure out how to customize the appearence and shortcuts. Plenty of settings can be changed via kcontrol. Numerous themes can be downloaded from sites like www.kde-look.org. All of these are pretty trivial.

There is more to customizing KDE though. Much more. KDE has a very modular block-type design. This is great because you can easily use these blocks to build something that you need and that noone has created yet or at least not shared in a way easily locatable. I am talking about kdialog and kdcop.

Continue reading Shaping up KDE all the way