the corner office : tech blog

How nice to use a tool that just does the right thing with excellent results. I normally type up my assignments using LaTeX, but I needed to send a waaay overdue assignment to a lecturer pronto. Given the time constraints I scrawled out the solutions and scanned the pages to pngs.

I thought it was going to be a nightmare to get the pages converted and sized into a single pdf. Enter ImageMagick, which generated a perfect-resolution pdf using a simple

convert q*.png myassignment.pdf

Thank you ImageMagick, you rock.

Each year I do a review of what I've done technically. 2010 wasn't that exciting, 2011 even less. I think my pet projects stagnated in March. Between studies and a busy year at work, I did next to nothing tech-wise at home. Mostly because of time, but partly just being all coded out from work.

Work is where the interesting stuff has been, as usual I don't talk too much about that. I've gotten my fingers a little dirtier with Python, though it's still largely a case of Google-on-one-screen-code-on-the-other when cranking out scripts. Python is great to get stuff done quickly, but I still prefer Java for heavy lifting.

I'm not going to bother about 2012 goals yet, that kinda depends on how exams go. If exams don't go well it's going to be more of the same. Even if they do go well, after the past year, there's a good chance 2012 will be spent playing computer games and little else. Then again, I'm sure I've said that before...

I ran into the bug discussed in this Stack Overflow post: Why do some floating point numbers appear with a trailing 0?

A ten year old bug only fixed in Java 7.

The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

I finally got around to upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04, and finally got to see why people got so worked up about Unity. Maybe it's great for new users but for me, no thanks. I like the idea of the menu bar at the top of the screen - that was a cool feature from the old Apple Macintosh world, but the big buttons and search box et al - not for me. Switched back to Gnome classic quick-spot.

Apparently Linux Mint is where it's at these days.

It's been a decade and a half since I got my first login to a Linux box, so it's hardly a revelation, but Unix rocks. Every day I find new ways in which it rocks.

I'm enjoying Python.

I switched to Windows on the laptop last year to play EVE Online, but even though I'm no longer playing EVE Online the laptop still stays in Windows. This is an old laptop, XP still feels zippy on it, and studying means I don't spend nearly as much time coding or doing heavy lifting at home as I used to. So I've had no impetus to switch back to Ubuntu.

At work, after a year of living predominantly on a Windows desktop (a dozen Putty and cygwin sessions notwithstanding), I'm again using Linux as a dev environment. How I've missed Ctrl-Alt-Left and Right!

Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix. Best quote:

Save yourself the embarrassment, and avoid posting on the comments section jwz's quote on regular expressions. You are not jwz.

C++0x is now C++11