02 June 2007
The title mem spawned in my mind as a result of two things. First, I finally tried a tiling window manager, after many people recommending it to me throughout the last year or two (most recently in the comments to “My Linux Stack”, thanks Torben!). Secondly, I didn’t have too much time recently to play with my setup, having high school final exams and getting back to work, so I found 900mb of updates waiting for me in portage.
Now, 900mb is a lot. A few years ago I had a pretty complete and useful Slackware setup on my old computer weighing 900mb. I choosed packages by hand, I used some advice from the Saving Space HOWTO, made ruthless decisions about what software I need and what not. Now, I have 12gb filled up on the partition with Gentoo. I wonder how much of it is garbage. I decided I don’t want it this way anymore and I don’t want to spend that much time on keeping up to date with the software, upgrading packages, fiddling with this stuff etc. more >>
09 May 2007
Table of contents:
1: General overview
3: Fighting with POP3 / SSL
4: Serving the thing through HTTP
5: Putting the pieces together
6: Conlusions
This article is my submission for the Erlang blogging contest. You can also grab it as a PDF file - in a4 format or in letter format.
1: General overview
Functional programming languages are often underestimated, as they seem to be not suited for the “real world”, being thought of as designed by scientists who spend their time mainly developing theories, not practical software. What makes Erlang stand out from the crowd is the fact it was designed by the industry and for the industry. Ericsson, where the language originated, has a telecom switch with more than 2 million lines of Erlang code running it that has a downtime of a few minutes per year - now this is reliability!
Telecom switches don’t make programmers too excited those days through, so we will try to do something more related to your everyday hacking. In this tutorial I will show you how to write a standalone daemon, that checks your email every x minutes, and makes the results available as an RSS feed. If you want to centralize all your notifications around RSS this may even be useful a bit and even if not, at least it makes a good example of some of Erlang strengths. I try to explain everything in as much detail as possible, but be warned - we won’t be writing any “hello worlds” here, we will just rapidly introduce a lot of awkward stuff as it becomes necessary, so if you don’t have a solid programming background you may have serious trouble. Either way, you will probably want to consult Programming Erlang and the free, official Erlang docs if you want to do anything serious in Erlang. Also see my previous post for an overview of general high level Erlang concepts. more >>
12 March 2007
It seems that the times when programs run sequentially using one main processor are finally getting to an end… Not only more and more computations get so complex you need to use a whole network of computers to do them, not only computer clusters are increasingly popular, but also our own home computers finally have become somewhat “parallel”. As we reached the border where we can’t tune the processor frequencies so much, chip vendors seem to look for hope in multi-CPU, multi-core circuits as in Intel Core 2 Duo for example. This has multiple benefits, but also raises one big issue - the troubles with writing programs that use the multiple chips or even multiple computers efficiently. At the same time, the Web still grows, and we have more and more systems where hundreds of thousands of people interact with the software in real time (examples vary from MMORPGs to web servers).
more >>
18 February 2007
When you look at popular articles/posts about programming in the last few years, one topic comes back over and over and each time its extremely popular - the “enlightenment” that comes with learning Common Lisp, Scheme, Haskell or sometimes yet another not-so-mainstream language like Smalltalk. Recently people started even bragging about the “language of the gods”. I think the thing that started the buzz was the “Howto become a hacker” text. But I didn’t seen any particular too much wonderful Lisp applications written by ESR…
After thinking about it for a while, come on, it’s total bullshit. Someone can conclude from those articles that learning macros, continuations, monads or whatever will turn one into a alpha programmer, or a super-human. Yes, those are all interesting concepts, they stretch your mind, you get a better programmer as you learn it. I greatly appreciate it and I try to learn things like that myself all the time. But don’t get trapped into believing that this is THAT important - there are other as important or even more important fields no-one is blogging about. Its also a lot like saying that just getting a new guitar will make you a better guitarist. The language is just a tool, maybe it’s time to stress more other topics like problem solving techniques, good design skills, which are current all the time.
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31 October 2006
A lot of knowledgeable people swear by Emacs. But when you first open it up you can get scared. Its hard to open a file without entering a mysterious key combination, there is no syntax-highlight, no file browser, no auto-indent… So what’s the reason? There are actually three of them I believe:
- Emacs is a editor-building framework, not an editor itself. If you want to use it, you need to customize it. Using a plain Emacs doesn’t make much sense.
- A lot of the nice stuff is in the CVS version. Eg. a lot of people is using stable versions of Emacs with some ugly X11 toolkit on Linux, where actually there is a much better version with GTK2, Xft and lots of other nice stuff, but you need to grab it from CVS.
- You need to get to know the various packages Emacs provides to explore it full power
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21 October 2006
My Linux stack
Well, I was bored a bit today. As usual I started Firefox and I’ve tried to find something interesting on reddit, del.icio.us or digg… I found nothing, so I thought I would write something interesting myself to kill the boredom :) I’m now “the guy who wrote the interview with famous programmers” and I don’t even hope to beat the popularity of that post ever with anything, so I will just try to have some fun now.
One of the topics I like to write about is software. And as I have been using Linux exclusievely for about two years and for seven years in general I have been writing mostly about Linux or cross-platform essentials. I don’t want to repeat the topics one-by-one or translate my Polish posts, so I thought I would write just one post gathering the essence of my knowledge about Linux.
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16 October 2006
At some hot, boring afternoon I got an _Idea_. With the help of public accessible e-mail adresses I asked 10 questions to a bunch of programmers that I consider very interesting people and I respect them for variuos things they created. Coming out with question was a 5 minute job for me - these are things I would ask about if I could speak with them personally for, let’s say, 10 minutes, and I didn’t have time for thinking too much. The last two question don’t have anything to do with programming, this is simply something I like to know about everyone I talk to, lets say that’s my hobby. Not everyone wanted to answer them, and that’s fine. It was the first “interview” I ever made, so I also made some mistakes, which went out as people started answering… But despite of this, I learnt a lot of interesting stuff, so it was definietly a valuable experience.
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