Agile Tsar Dmitri Dolguikh pointed out Project Euler yesterday, which is a website containing a series of short programming problems. It reads a bit like bonus questions on a math exam, which is actually quite refreshing compared to the day-to-day problems at work. For added fun, I’m trying to run through the problems in Common Lisp. So far I have completed 4 out of 179 problems, which makes me 2% genius, according to the site. »
A lot of people are linking to this article about the state of the practice in CS curriculum and its use of Java creating dull replaceable drones. mdehaan points out a wonderful section wherein the authors relate Java programming to a plumber in a hardware store, finding pieces and putting them together to solve a problem, rather than their unmentioned alternative (maybe an artist molding clay?) If this is true, then we, the software industry and software engineering fields, are done. »
We made a delicious pizza on the weekend with a great thin crust pizza dough recipe found on the tubes. It went well with Old Credit Brewing Co. Ltd.’s Pale Pilsner. »
< mdehaan> atomic commits are dangerous, just as atomic weapons He may have been sarcastic. Maybe. »
Devan and I were chatting a bit about Fedora upgrades this morning. Given that he and I are both recovering debian users, we do miss (apparently) seamless live upgrades between releases. So following on the heels of Doug and Devan, here is my take on upgrades. First, offline upgrades will always be required for some cases. There’s always going to be some cruft we need to drop, and can’t do it on a live system. »
On the subway ride home I played around with adding a progress bar to pkcon, PackageKit’s command line interface. I’m quite certain this is the most worthwhile thing I’ve done this week. »
Fedora People, rather than concerning yourself with who posts what in which language, how about using atom’s support for per-post language tagging and filtering the feed? Here is an English language only Fedora People feed (courtesy Yahoo Pipes). »
This checkin to python brings a long-awaited (and sorely needed, IMO) enhancement to python: SSL certificate verification support. Once the API support percolates up from socket through the various network libraries in python proper, for the vast majority of developers there will no longer be a need for PyOpenSSL, M2Crypto, or rhnlib. »
# Assorted functions for various things Thank you, developers of yore. You’ve made things oh so much clearer to this lowly maintenance programmer. »
BarCampRDU is going on now at Red Hat. There are a lot of good topics (distributed version control, grails, juggling), and plenty of free stuff. Looks like it will be a great day. Check out the photos or blog posts. »