alec

The link-time optimizations seem useful - not only can the output code run faster, but the compilation is in parallel. Has anyone tried it? g++ is a fast compiler and it's easy to parallelize on files, but making the linker faster/parallel sounds like a big deal.

Try viper and/or vimpulse. It doesn't get you all the way to vim, but it gets most of the important stuff.

The "reading mail in emacs" option he didn't mention is notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/). It's a mail indexer with full-text search and a few front-ends, the most-widely used being for emacs. It's search is really fast, and it was fast enough to make me forget folders once and for all.

From a link in the bug report, it's a WebKit rendering bug that was fixed over half a year ago. Either Chrome's release schedule doesn't include updating WebKit frequently or the fix was incomplete.

I hear that some carriers will penalize your frequent flier account if you skip the last portion of a journey.

Use gensym to make a unique sentinel.

"after all, how much can you actually save by [skipping a flight]"?

Many airlines have complicated pricing models that attempt to capture market demand.

For example, I just looked up flights from Portland, ME to Los Angeles, departing on Jan 19 and returning Jan 26. If you take US and connect through Philadelphia, the cheapest price is $309. If you were to fly from Philadelphia to Los Angeles non-stop on that same day, it's $399 - 30% more expensive! If US were to allow you to skip the first and last part of the Portland-Los Angeles trip and get on and off at Philadelphia, they would receive substantially less revenue.

This infographic suggests taking 2,000 IUs/day. Both the Mayo Clinic and WebMD say that more than 2,000 IUs/day can be toxic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/vitamin-d/NS_patient-vitami... http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-lifestyle-guide/supplement-gui...

It really isn't. Replace "Lisp" with "Perl" and "theoreticians" with something evocative of the stereotypical Perl programmer and you have the exact same nonsubstantive rant that adds little to the discussion of what a good programming language should look like or why a particular one is bad.

I've been a "working programmer" who happens to write Common Lisp for a few years. Common Lisp is a programming language like any other: people who write good code in other languages can write good code in Common Lisp, and people who write bad code can make everyone's life just as miserable. Most time spent figuring out a new code base isn't the style or set of features used, it's figuring out the domain-specific logic. Macros aren't abused to any greater extent than C++'s operator<<, monkeypatching, or preprocessors.

I am of the opinion that anyone who calls Common Lisp a "theoretically-pure" language has not done anything but a simple recursion exercise: features like loop's inability to detect sequence type, the difference between progn and prog1 in terms of multiple values, having functions like rplaca or caar, and mixing &optional with &key are not what I think of when I think elegant or "theoretically-pure". They're there because the designers were sometimes wrong and sometimes doing the best with what they had.

There's a large volume that contains all of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction short stories. They're great because they are indeed short, and while not all of them are good, a number of them fill me with the same sort of wonder I get from reading the first Foundation book.

If you're on an Asimov kick, The Caves of Steel is also pretty good, and has a Foundation-style twist at the end.

The ThinkPad X series. The X201 is similar in size, weight, and price, but can hold a modern CPU and gets an extra several hours of battery life. You can also get mobile internet access, although I'm not sure of what type.

ThinkPad construction stands up to a whole lot, and the keyboard is fantastic. I have a five-year-old X40 that is still chugging along wonderfully - I'd like to get a new laptop, but I just can't justify it.

I have only had one issue running Linux on it: because I use Debian, the non-free wireless firmware must be downloaded separately. I have never had a problem with Ubuntu, even the early versions I tried, because they include it. Intel has put a lot of work into getting all of their stuff supported in Linux, and it shows.

I hear the Sony Z series has a similar story: similar size/weight/price, better hardware and battery life.

The author of the article was disappointed that the service was being discontinued, but his main reason for writing seemed to be calling attention to how quietly Google announced that it was destroying data. People won't download the data if they don't know it's going away.

I ran into this the other day, too. According to a gtk2hs developer, it's a limitation in cabal: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=46AA...

flag it!

I tried a svn build of clang++ two months ago on our in-house code base of hundreds of thousands of lines of C++. I didn't see much advantage to using it.

- I felt misled by all the advertising on the website. They are comparing to Apple's version of gcc-4.2. The last GNU release of gcc-4.2 was two and a half years ago. Even Debian stable has something newer. Compared to gcc-4.2, the newer gcc-4.5 compiles faster, produces faster code, and gives better diagnostics. The comparison on the website was not useful for me to predict the differences now.

- In terms of compile speed, clang was sometimes faster and sometimes slower than gcc-4.5, but overall the differences were very minor.

- In terms of performance, clang was >10% slower, which is OK for debugging builds.

- The diagnostics were a little prettier than gcc-4.5's, but not a huge improvement. I think it was mostly because they were in color.

- Getting the existing codebase to compile was a chore. gcc bends the rules of the C++ standard in some ways that don't appear to cause confusion but make the code more pleasant. For example, it allows unqualified lookup into dependent bases of class templates, which means you can write "foo()" instead of "this->foo()" in things that look like class members (see http://clang.llvm.org/compatibility.html#dep_lookup_bases). There are a number of these - look through the page. I felt like clang was being inappropriately pedantic and beating me over the head with the standard. The most frustrating part was that the compiler wasn't confused - the error message gave me a copy/paste set of changes to make.

- On my Debian system, I could not find a set of c++0x headers that clang knew how to compile (the official instructions say "use gcc's"), so I couldn't try out the new standard.

I have a Kinesis keyboard and used a Microsoft Natural before that. If I were looking for a replacement keyboard, I would base most of my evaluation on three things:

- Does it separate out the hands? This one does to some extent, but it looks like less than the Microsoft or Kinesis.

- How many keys do you need to press with your pinky? What I like most about the Kinesis is that it moves many keys traditionally pressed with the pinky finger - control, alt, enter, backspace, delete - to under the thumbs. It's much easier to hold the modifiers down with your thumb because the muscle is so much bigger, and it's nicer to hit enter/backspace because you don't have to stretch your finger.

- Does it have mechanical key switches instead of the plastic bubbles? I don't know how good this one's are, but it's noticeably less work to press the switches and requires a constant/predictable amount of force on the Kinesis compared to the Microsoft and others. This really adds up over a day of typing.

I used to maintain Debian packages. As far as I know (or could find looking through the Policy manual and a few language-specific packaging guidelines), there is no policy against running tests after builds. I spent a few minutes looking through several packages and didn't see any that ran tests, but I have seen bug reports about test failures. If there are tests and they run using a reasonable amount of resources, I can't imagine anyone would argue against running them. The package maintainer has to do it, and I assume that some mess up.

I work at ITA and review puzzle submissions. I can't say what practices were 10 years ago (before we had our first customer!), but I would be shocked if this happened today or even several years ago when I joined. All of us did a puzzle to get an interview and we respect the time and effort it takes.

Quote of the article: "I fantasize about buying an industrial-grade stapler capable of punching through three journal papers and calling it The Dissertator."

From the video, it looks like they have a Bayesian-style mail filter, but instead of applying it to find spam, they apply it to find important mail. This is not too hard to set up; the tricky bit they've automated is analyzing which emails are read and replied to, as opposed to just which ones are marked, so it's more automatic.

Thanks for your feedback! That's a bug - we should have a fix out tomorrow. The issue is with spaces in completion, so if you just type "san", you should see San Diego in the list.

Thanks for your feedback! I've passed it on to our iPhone people. If you find anything else, there's a feedback button in the app, or you can email onthefly-comments@itasoftware.com. I wasn't able to get a hold of the development schedule or a developer just now, but I imagine flexible dates would be on the list.

(I work at ITA on the QPX flight search engine).

The new Matrix (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) has the color bar functionality, too, but looks a littler friendlier! When you search, click "time bars" on the right below the carrier matrix. It was one of the most-requested features.

My reaction was the opposite. They're not going after people who use their Java implementation or OpenJDK, they're going after the distributors of an alternate implementation of something like Java that is infringing on the patents related to language implementation. Oracle's (formerly Sun's) Java versions, including ME and EE, still look safe.

I thought it was interesting that Linux was completely absent from all of the market position talk.

Considering that Sun released Java before the GPL v3 was finished, I assume that it's under the GPL v2. v2 doesn't have the same patent guarantees that v3 does, and these guarantees were an important reason for creating v3. Specifically, the GPL v3 specifically prohibits this sort of "make it free software and then sue over the patents". The GPL FAQ claims that in some countries, releasing software under the GPL v2 constitutes a patent license, but I don't think that applies in the US.

If you've never done it before, you'll probably be terrible. I was the first time I interviewed someone (and the second, and ...) despite all the preparation I did. If you're in a position to do hiring interviews for your employer, definitely do it - not only will you get better at it with practice, but you'll probably better on the other side of the table, too.

I hear rave reviews about the recently-revamped Hotmail, but haven't quite overcome my prejudice against the brand to try it.

That example of how to upgrade for security fixes is much more complicated and less reliable than Debian's "apt-get upgrade".

For example, take a Firefox or PHP security vulnerability. Those projects generally don't just release a new version with the security fixes; they'll throw in whatever feature changes they've made along the way. I don't want to sort through the various changes and patches to find the right combination; trust me, it's no fun, I worked on the Debian security team for a while. It's important to me to get just the security fixes because I don't have time for a constant upgrade treadmill and there will be new bugs in with the new features.

I really want my operating system to just work and get out of the way. If I didn't need any packages from ports, I think FreeBSD would fit that bill.

I used FreeBSD and OpenBSD for a while, and what drove me back to GNU/Linux was package management. OpenBSD was OK at it even if it had a limited selection, but I never had much luck with FreeBSD ports. Having a nice, stable base system wasn't very useful when ports were always being updated to the latest version; if I wanted a security fix, I had to take all the feature changes and new bugs, too. I tried a bunch of different port upgrading scripts but they always seemed to miss something. And upgrading ports took a long time; I want to be using my computer, not having my work interrupted by compiling in the background and occasional troubleshooting.

I have high hopes for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD - the FreeBSD kernel with the Debian package management.