I’ve started the Mom’s visit countdown clock to T - 13 days and counting. I’ve spent the last week getting her new powerbook ready when she visits. Yup, she’s getting a new 12in powerbook. She’ll be one hip old lady. It’s running Tiger right now and it has a full development environment installed (xcode, gcc, ruby, darwinports). The development environment is really for me to use while I shakedown her new Mac (I’m typing on it as we speak, getting the battery to drain down so that it will be calibrated correctly). I’m not sure what she’ll need though… At a minimum, she’ll need a web browser for her browsing and webmail needs. I’ll try to get her a nice easy book about Macs so that she learn how to use it better.

In other news, I’ve been on Ruby and C++ template metaprogramming kick lately. But those are entries for another time.

Also tonight, season 2 of BSG begins. I wasn’t sure about watching BSG when it started. I grew up with the old series and I wasn’t sure how I would handle some of the changes. But that’s all in the past, after watching a couple of episodes from season 1. Right now, BSG is the best sci-fi series out there. In fact, it’s as good as TNG seasons 4 - 7.

A couple of videos I found showing people programming….

Developing DSLs in Lisp

Rails Academy

WTFV?

It’s rare that I pay for a text editor. Emacs/Vim have been my steady workhorse editors for the last decade. They are pretty darn good but they’ve been locked into their text editing paradigm. Vim is not an editor for a newbie. Neither is emacs though it probably has a lower barrier to entry. Learn to use them well and you’ll be wielding your keyboard like a jedi master wields his light saber. But like I said, it’s rare that I pay for a text editor. But I did. Check it out, it’s called Textmate. It’s new. It’s raw. But it has some incredibly nice ideas that made my jaw drop. It worked really well for writing ruby code which is what I spent the weekend doing. I wish Emacs/Vim implemented snippets (that is the best idea for a text editor I’ve seen in awhile). Pithy about its lack of customization options and foreign (to me) key bindings…

I’ve just finished setting up my older powerbook over the weekend. I bought it over 3 years ago and it is still running solid. With Tiger installed, it seems to run as good as ever. If I had to upgrade any part, it would be the hard drive. installed darwinports, ruby, perl, pugs, sbcl, various C++ and Java libraries. Xcode2 seems to be faster than the previous version and I’m might get the hang of programming in it. Eclipse runs like a dog which is unfortunate because I wanted to try it out a lot more.

Right now I’m trying out some of the boost libraries which lets me do wicked cool stuff like:

std::for_each(v.begin(), v.end(), std::cout << _1);

I want to find out how they got the _1 to appear as a anonymous variable.

Link: malevole - Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?.

“Effective C++ is one of those C++ books you should reread every couple of years. I remember little C++ rules but always forget where they came from. Most of the time I read them in Effective C++. A new edition of Effective C++ has just been released and I’m working through all 55 items. It’s a good read. It’s a quick read. It’s a must read.

Another good book that has recently come out is C++ Common Knowledge. A little in the vein of Effective C++ but geared towards making yourself an intermediate C++ programmer.

And because you should always refresh your C++ every so often, a new edition of the “C++ Primer is out. It reads better than ever and I recommend it to every new C++ programmer out there. I think Bjarne’s book has merit but definitely start off with the primer.

C++. A semester to learn. A lifetime spent blowing your leg off. :-)