We live in an incredible time where virtual reality is on the horizon. I’ve had some mind-expanding conversations with several folks about it, and over the course of a few months have compiled a few little thoughts and opinions on VR and the role it potentially has in our lives.

Earlier today I did a code review and saw my coworker using Array.new to create an empty array. This gives the same return value as the literal constructor []. But are they the same internally?

I’ve been maintaining several blogs for about 10 years, and I’ve come up with a few practices that I use to guide how I keep these going.

Many of us sling code, do product reviews, spend hours in a chair with nothing but gdb and silence. And though we talk shop with coworkers about minor features in the x86 architecture, a dark, ugly secret lurks.

In the space of 20 minutes, I’ve closed out two personal projects, that combined represent hundreds of hours of effort. And it feels wonderful.

On the slim chance that there’s another OpenBSD user who also wants to sync files to their BlackBerry Playbook, read on!

This is one of the protocols that I’m kind of surprised isn’t in more use, by virtue of its simplicity in implementation. RFC 865 is a layer 7 debugging RFC where a socket listens for a TCP or UDP connection, and then sends a short, arbitrary message.

The first IETF standard was an informational affair, a housekeeping standardization-process snapshot that summed up the current ‘best practice’ RFCs that’s led up to it.

This is the first article I’ve typed completely using Dvorak, a keyboard layout that is designed for more ergonomic typing, completing a far greater amount of words on the home row than QWERTY.

After a quick discussion with Mo Khan about books we’ve read, I realized it would be efficient just to make a list of books I can recommend for tech folks, picking out the ones that really made me think. I read about 6-12 tech books a year, so expect this list to change and grow over time. No particular order of importance, just grab any of these that looks good.

Code Complete, by Steve McConnell

This was the book that changed my approach to programming, and made me care about style. Like reading Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style makes you a better writer, Code Complete is one of those books that will make you write better code.

Oh, the times they are a-changing. I was reviewing some code done by a coworker and saw they had .1 seconds for a timeout on one of their checks. I suggested a 1 second timeout, and to satisfy my curiosity ran a test that delivered an unrealistically extreme workload, saturating the CPUs, while still trying to get a socket timeout. And wouldn’t you know it, the timeout of .1 seconds was never reached.

I had the privilege of joining the Chef Food Fight show today to discuss Chef Metal.

edited: I’ve since removed it. It’s unnecessary page bloat that doesn’t give any real benefit to myself or my friends - probably why it never succeeded in the first place ;-)

Years ago, as I stumbled through my first real programming job, I started paying attention to my text editor. You can run through a haze of text editors before you get Serious About a Text Editor. I had tried nano, kate, and a whole bunch of others that I can’t recall the names of anymore, but my first Serious Text Editor where I actually read the manual was Gedit.

Now, how do you guess I came upon Gedit? Was there extensive research into the pros and cons? Nope, it was the standard Gnome editor, and I liked using Gnome (think Gnome 2, AKA ’the good days’). Was I happy with it? You bet. It used Python for its API, and I was on a hard Python kick at the time. When your baseline for a text editor is syntax highlighting, the selection is great.

Have you ever felt that there was a point where your codebase escaped from you? Where obvious bugs go unseen for long periods of time, and files lurk in the source tree, unauditable and ready to devour flesh?