eroullit

This will hardly work out. By reading only, you might (re)learn some things but with time, it will fade away again. To quickly learn a language and make it stick, you need to speak it and have real-life situations using it. No wonder that going to a foreign country is the best way to learn its language.

DPDK is Intel's turf and PF RING only supports igb/ixgbe/e1000 drivers. For out of the box usage, looking at Netmap or Linux PACKET_MMAP (though not entirely zero-copy) should be possible.

For Vim mastering outside of Vim, I have found this quite pleasant: http://vim-adventures.com/

FindGLEW.cmake is a standard CMake module from v2.8.10. Previous versions do not have this file thus cannot build the project. You can install a newer version of CMake or get this file from CMake git repo and copy it to /usr/share/cmake-2.8/Modules/

I am a dev with C background and zero experience in nodejs. I have been using Drywall to get a Web GUI frontend for a CLI tool. Progress are slow on my side, yet it was very helpful to get me started.

XBMC is good but those laptops might be a bit too loud as a proper mediacenter. Install proxmox (http://www.proxmox.com/) and make yourself a cluster of small openVZ containers/KVMs to experiment new OS or new services.

For "longer" jump through the filesystem, 'autojump' does a great job https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump

git stripspace is a plus but if you are already considering to add a pre-commit hook, you could directly use 'indent'. It trims those pesky whitespaces and indent your code automatically the way you see fit. (e.g: https://gist.github.com/eroullit/1250603)