Toluu

CodingExperiments.com

CodingExperiments.com is a site where I can (obviously) experiment with various demonstrations of code.

The Sudden Epiphany of Understanding I Received from BloggingDecember 3

Update: Note that the thoughts I describe in this post ONLY apply to my blog posts. Three other authors have contributed to this blog.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my first post on this blog. Please do not read my first post, or any of the 136 other posts (not including this one), because you will be sorely disappointed.

A long time ago, I wanted to create a website where I could talk about some interesting tech-related ideas and see if anybody liked those ideas. Eventually, I registered a domain name for this blog and attached it to my web hosting account at Bluehost.

Was I successful?

Yes and no.

I’m a bit of a pessimist, so first I’m going to explain why I think I failed. My goal was to write many high quality blog posts centering around programming. The posts would include actual code examples. I’ve deviated far from my goal. With the difficulties I had with displaying code examples, I talked about other topics, such as blogging. (Although my posts on blogging and social media did get A-List blogger Louis Gray’s attention.)

I also took

Look at This, Mac Users! User Interfaces on the Linux Desktop Can Have Consistency!November 28

Mac users are very proud of their oh-so-shiny operating system and hardware. They have to be. Mac users paid good money for their system, and it would be quite a big waste of they weren’t proud of it.

The more extreme Mac users will go around and talk about how inconsistent Linux is and how the entire Linux community doesn’t give a hoot about consistency.

While it is true that not all applications have consistent user interfaces, due to different widget tookits, it is possible to achieve basic consistency with either one of the below methods:

1. Only use applications that use the same widget toolkit as all the other applications on your system.
2. Use something like GTK-Qt to achieve consistency with multiple widget toolkits.

The second option listed doesn’t work perfectly, so to both get access to all the best applications on Linux and still have consistency would be to apply the first option until one encounters a totally awesome app that uses a different widget toolkit, and then use something along the lines of GTK-Qt to make that awesome app look consistent with the rest of the system.

Below is a screenshot of a GNOME desktop in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. There are small differences, such as the icons added by Firefox extensions being inconsistent with the other applications, but the desktop in general is pretty consistent.

A Brief History of Build Systems #1: IntroductionNovember 16

The ancient practice of putting various monsters in unexplored regions of maps and the phrase based on that, “Here be dragons“, applies still to programming.  Personally, I’ve always had a dragon the size of a moon (or battlestation, if one prefers) on my own mental map in the area of build systems.  Hopefully, this should be a series, with several tutorials succeeding this brief summary of available options.

What is a Build System?

Just a quick introduction for those who are uninitiated into these rgb(0,0,0) arts.  A build system offers a relatively easy way to automate building and packaging of a software system.  While something as simple as a one-line shell script could supposedly be written for smaller projects, this has several problems.  Firstly, it would tend to redundantly and naively recompile objects that have already been built and have not been changed.  Secondly, this has no portability system; that is, it has no way to analyze the host system and find the appropriate utilities and libraries on differing platforms.  There are more reasons, of course, but these are the crux of the matter.

Current Build Systems

Make

Make is one of the oldest build systems, having its first release in 1977 at

Why Web 2.0 Applications Deserve the Permanent BetaNovember 8

The web application in permanent beta is the latest fashion in today’s Internet world. Some folks believe that after several years of testing, that web applications ought to shed the beta tag and call themselves stable.

I disagree.

Open source desktop software is significantly more flexible than a closed source web application in terms of giving what users want. Desktop applications have extensibility through plugins, extensions, themes, and so forth. Web applications currently have only a weak extensibility through Greasemonkey.

Facebook Apps are closer to true extensibility, but Facebook remains in control over Facebook Apps, which results in rumors that Facebook is going to close down third party apps. Developers creating extensions of desktop applications usually do not have to worry about their extensions being wiped off the face of the Earth.

Also regarding Facebook, some users are not happy with Facebook’s transition to a new user interface. There is even a petition for the old user interface to return. I suggest you compare Facebook to Wordpress. Nobody is going to force a blogger to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, but there is li

The Windows 95 / FreeBSD 7.0 Tradeoff I FacedNovember 3

A year or two ago, I dug out an old Compaq Presario 4508 with the task to get Ethernet working on it. After multiple failed attempts, I was successful. But my efforts were worthless, because I couldn’t find a decent browser for it.

Last week, I dug out the old Compaq Presario 4508 again to install Linux on it. I booted up the Slackware CD, and found that none of the kernels on the CD would work on the Presario. Rather than spending time debugging error messages or creating a custom kernel, I moved onto FreeBSD, which succesfully installed the first time around. Because of the very limited RAM that the Presario had, running xorg wasn’t, and still isn’t, an option. So I peacefully went to work trying to install Python and a terminal web browser.

Yesterday, when I successfully installed the web browser, the issue hit me. I sacrificed a somewhat ancient operating system with a working GUI for a more modern, stable, and secure operating system without a graphical user interface. Did I make the right choice? Most software that I care about is available or can be easily compiled on FreeBSD, but I cannot use anything that requires a GUI. With Windows 95, I had a graphical user interface, but a limited set of modern applications that still can be run on Windows 95.

So what choice would you make? Would you go with the old OS with a GUI or the modern, stable, secure, and graphics free OS?

Not counting this footnote, the blog post is exactly 248 words