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The Beowülf song "today is a gift" sampled the "noodles" exchange, which prompted me to watch the KFP movies.

I found "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" [1] by Joseph M. Williams to be more informative than both of these recommendations, but YMMV. There is a newer version, but I haven't read it.

[1]: https://smile.amazon.com/Style-Clarity-Chicago-Writing-Publi...

Kibana / ElasticSearch? It's limited, but pretty and interactive, and gets you a bunch with very limited up-front work. I'm sure you can find some better demos, but here's one: http://parlement.letemps.ch/

HUE is a similar but different alternative. The "search" tab has some great demos, but appears to be down atm: http://demo.gethue.com/

Using Coq to verify PDF files (video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPw7eo3nQI

The core of the xmonad window manager was verified with Coq (PDF):

http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~swier004/Publications/Xmonad...

One of the hints for assignment 2 is:

"Most of the solutions for this assignment can be written as one-liners. If you have more, you probably need to rethink your solution. In other words, this assignment needs more thinking (whiteboard, pen and paper) than coding ;-)."

Is it not entirely possible that they're getting some false positives?

vimpulse is an extension to viper and gives you (for example) visual mode (copy blocks using 'v').

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Vimpulse

> But it is so painful to try to switch. It's a heavy cognitive load to do even simple things like navigation.

You might be interested in viper mode [1], or another one of the VI emulation modes for emacs.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ViperMode

details here:

http://blog.acrossecurity.com/2011/05/anatomy-of-com-server-...

Congrats on making it through both. I haven't gotten to the dragon yet... For those interested, you can get a red dragon for significantly less than the newer editions (check amazon).

Somewhat related, Don's site: http://donsbot.wordpress.com/

Or you could use the Viper and Vimpulse packages to enable Vi style emulation in Emacs.

Might find this useful: http://astrometry.net/

Reminds me of the Cory Doctorow short story: "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away"

Available here: http://www.tor.com/stories/2008/08/weak-and-strange

This week's Economist on the coming currency / trade war:

http://www.economist.com/node/17251850?story_id=17251850&...

http://www.economist.com/node/17252006?story_id=17252006&...

apt-get install xfonts-terminus

Having the tilde so far away is pretty annoying in a shell, but I haven't invested the time in coming up with something better.

I'm pretty happy with LustyExplorer [1] which sounds like it does what iswitchb-mode does, but also has a decent find-file browser.

1. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LustyExplorer

With viper and vimpulse you get a pretty good vi emulation.

I used to use a Typematrix 2030, but have gone back to standard keyboards. I use viper and vimpulse in emacs, so I'm currently using the following mappings (in addition to a Dvorak layout):

CapsLock key = Backspace (I hate that reach)

Tilde key = Escape (for VI)

Escape key = CapsLock (for when you need it)

Backspace key = Tilde

My windows keys also function as Control, so that I don't have to be super accurate when using my pinky joint (where my pinky meets my palm) to press it.

Well, maybe I'm not the best person to ask, and my answer was a bit off-the-cuff. The best answer is probably more like: it depends on what you're doing.

But, I just find that Java makes life easier. For example, you don't have to worry about endianess issues. You don't have to worry about portability (as long as you can run a JVM). You can serialize objects across the network easily, and if you want to do stuff like RPC, there's Cajo.

On the C++ side, you have stuff like LAPACK? Though I'm not too sure about this stuff...

Also, Google's Protocol Buffers project is quite helpful in passing data around. (C++, Java, Python, in any combination)

Oh man.... the tooling situation....

Eclipse for Java.

Visual Studio for C++ on Windows. Netbeans everywhere else?

I am constantly dissapointed with my tools.

(edit) ViEmu for Visual Studio is excellent. I'm not sure if it's Eclipse or viPlugin for Eclipse, but one of them is laggy.

I simply meant that Solaris is now an Oracle property - not that they're Oracle DB boxes.

How easy is it to use C# on a (shudder) Oracle Solaris box?

(edit) In all honesty, skennedy makes a very good point. C# does seem to be gaining popularity. (And yes I'm aware of the Mono project.) Frankly, I just don't trust Microsoft. There have been compatibility issues with migrating between early versions of the .NET framework, and the end of Visual Basic left a bad taste in many mouths.

For distributed computing: Java.

I happen to work for a company in the financial sector.

Our developers use Java (mostly).

Our research department uses whatever they are most comfortable with for research, but the result of their research is coded up in C++. If we had to do it over, we'd probably do everything in Java. Misc. notes:

Personally, I am WAY more productive in Java.

I supplement Java with Clojure.

I find the performance penalty for using Java is pretty-much negligible. It's always how you do it that matters more than what language you do it in. Don't use Java Generics for number crunching though... use a dedicated primitives collection library like Colt.

Java and C++ are quite similar in some respects. I would say though, that it's easier to go from C++ to Java, than from Java to C++.

Best C++ books:

Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara E. Moo

Effective C++ by Scott Meyers (make sure you get the 3rd edition)

Best Java books:

Effective Java by Joshua Bloch

Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, and Joseph Bowbeer

If you have to use C++, start using the Boost C++ libraries early on. You can learn a great deal just by using the Boost libraries, and reading their documentation.

To avoid the "I'm a friend of [x] ..." email, I always say:

"Send me your resume, and I will make sure it gets to the right person."

I won't actually forward the resume on, but I usually look at the resume for curiosity - and if it's a friend I might send them a few pointers on how they could improve their resume. Pick the "Don't eat where you shit", "Don't mix business and pleasure", or whatever cliche you prefer.

Are you lying when you do this? Maybe. If they're not a good candidate, you might as well be the "right person" to discard their resume.

Alternatively, you could say something like:

"I had a bad experience recommending a friend, so I make it a personal rule that I don't do it anymore."

(I would probably make an exception for exceptional people.)

I was browsing the Java API docs a few days ago when I noticed that the shortcut icon (left of the URL in firefox) had changed from a steaming mug, to a white O on a red background.

That's when it really hit me.

(Though I think Oracle have changed the icon back since.)