Visual Studios 2010

While I'm usually a big open source fan, I can't deny that I've always found Visual Studios a fairly productive development platform. VS 2010 has added a few changes that I'm really liking. For instance, finally, yes finally Microsoft realized developers use multiple desktops to write code. So now in 2010 you can drag and drop your code sheets and tool bars anywhere you want on the screens. That feature is a decade late but hey, it's there now... Also as I spend much of my time on the database end, I can now connect directly to a sql server db through visual studios and write queries, modify sps, whatever I want to do without ever having to open Sql server management studio. Now for more hardcore DB work Management Studio is still neccessary for tasks like creating databases and table. It also appears that Visual Studios 2010 includes some much more robust code analyzer tools, I haven't had a whole lot of time to look into them, but from tutorials I've seen they look like they could be a big help in ensuring code consistency and mantainability.

TextMate

Just discovered another great TextMate feature. TODO. Type TODO and add your todo thought, and then you can go to Bundles->ToDo-> Show TODO list and it will consolidate all of the TODOS into a single list regardless where they are in your project. This feature is great for when you're coding, have a concept of something you'd like to add or possibly review or change, but don't currently have the time to do so. Great way to stay more organized and on top of things.

Putback

I was flipping through my c++ book today, a book I haven't really used since my freshmen year, and discovered a very useful function, putback(char) . When reading in a stream of characters it allows you to put a character back into the stream, could be very useful for certain parsing needs.
-- Post From My iPhone

Bison

Learning about compilers, I'm finding Bison & flex very interesting. The setup is a bit cryptic at first, but I'm starting to really appreciate the power and simplicity of Bison and lalr(1).


-- Post From My iPhone

airport extreme basestation and Fedora 10

I'm impressed, on the first try I was able to get my hp psc 750 printer (that is connected to my airport extreme basestation) to work with Fedora 10. All I had to do was (in Fedora) go to printer setup, choose the category "AppSocket/HP JetDirect", I entered in the IP of the airport which for me was 10.0.1.1, the next step asked me for what type of printer, and it was done! Tried to print out a page and it worked perfectly. I was expecting this to be a freagin 10 hour project.

SDF

For anyone that doesn't know SDF or Super Dimension Fortress is a truly awesome resource for the linux/unix geeks. And best of all it'sThe website isn't very user friendly, and signing up for a membership isn't clear at all. But the services are great. For a small price you can get ftp,ssh, domain names for your website, and lots of different programming languages.

Fedora 10 & Radeon x3870x2

Hurrah!! For crappy drivers. I've been using Fedora 10 for some time now, just upgraded to the new ati drivers( ATI Catalyst™ 9.1 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver) and now there is an attractive water mark on the bottom right hand of my screen, overlapping everything else. The watermark reads "AMD Unsupported hardware", I reviewed ati's knowledge base, and it indicated that either my hardware was truelly not supported, or I was missing a "control" or "signature" file from /etc/ati. Both files are present on my install, and I chose the ati drivers under the 3xxx model series. So either it wasn't tested with the 3870 x2 or there is something else wrong with the new driver release. Either way I downgraded to the previous 8.12 release, and now the watermark is no more. On a side note, I'm actually very much pleased with the ati catalyst driver installation process now, before you had to turn off x-server before you could install them, now it's a simple gui window, with just a restart required.