If you've ever asked yourself which distro is right for me? then you might be interested in trying them all. :D

But I have some further suggestions:

• {Free,Open,Net,PC-}BSD
• Solaris, OpenSolaris, Nexenta
• ReactOS
• Plan9
• Minix
• SkyOS
• GNU Hurd (heck why not :D )

I once tried quadruple booting Gentoo, WinXP, Solaris and OS X, but the latter two conflicted with each other, so I had to pick one of them at a time.

Which programming language should I learn?

It's a question that comes up a lot, especially by novices who are trying to get into programming. It's a good question, but I'm not sure if it's the *right* question. It is a bit like walking into a tool shed and asking which tool should I use? To which the answer is... all the ones you need.

Peter Norvig wrote an opinion about novice programming a few years ago, called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. He argued that a lot of people underestimate what it is to learn programming, judging by how many books there are on the subject of learning it quickly. And he said that people should realize it takes long and not be in such a hurry.

I find myself past the 10 year mark myself, since I started some time in junior high. Or maybe even elementary if you count modifying integer variables in Basic to make the gorilla throw a banana and cause a bigger explosion (and MsDos hackers here?), but without any interest in learning to code at the time.

At this point you might be tempted to ask... so did you? Well, I can't say that I know how, but I know enough to get by. I know enough to code the kind of things I have use for. And I never set out to accomplish more than that.

But returning to the question, whatever language you choose, it will be your first language. But it won't be the only language. There are people who have spent 10 years writing nothing but Excel macros, and never touched another programming language. But if you're asking this question, presumably you're not willing to limit yourself to Excel macros. And unless you actually spend decades writing the same kind of applications you will definitely touch multiple languages. So whichever does or doesn't come first isn't really that important.

In 10+ years I've touched quite a few languages. Aside from Basic, my very first attempts were with Pascal, and a few years later it was Delphi, writing silly desktop applications, in particular encryption software. (Along with a friend we made up a mock company called MicroProgz, and inexplicably, the website has somehow survived to this date. :proud: ) In college, they were big on Java, which I didn't particularly love from the start. But since that was the language du jour, I saw quite a bit of it; gui, databases, threading, networking. The gui was the worst by far. We also built mock applications for mock businesses for assignments, so that's the first time I encountered SQL. Around this time I was into web programming, so I started playing with PHP on my own. I also wanted to get into C++, which was sort of the "real" language you were supposed to know, or that was my impression at least. I took a course in it (through which I also had a modest introduction to C) and ever since... I've never really needed it. My college thesis introduced yet another language: Python. I took to it immediately, it was incredibly... readable. Since then I've also been introduced to Haskell at university and played a bit with Ruby on the side. And inevitably, as a linux user I've also had the opportunity to use Bash for all kinds of small things. I even took a stab at Perl a few weeks ago, and ran for the hills over the gruesome syntax.

So it's not so much which language to learn? as it is what do I want to do right now? Eventually you will probably see them all. Or many of them. And what's more, the tools of today are not the tools of tomorrow. Fortran, Cobol, Smalltalk, Algol.. these were the languages preceding my time. Perhaps I'll find some historical interest in some of them one day, but for the moment I have no use for them. In 1995 Java was a new thing, today it's perhaps the most used language out there. C# arrived in 2001, I haven't really had the opportunity to use it yet, but it's definitely making inroads. The thing is that whichever language you choose it becomes a means to accomplish something today, yes, but in the long run it becomes a stepping stone to another language you'll need in the future.

Of course, jack of all trades, master of none holds true just the same. Like a craftsman needs years to master his tools, achieving excellence takes a long time. Although I've encountered many languages (and I expect to see more in the future), I don't know any of them inside out. But... is that really a problem? There isn't a perfect language, each one teaches you to think about code in a different way. And that's really more important than any single language. Unavoidably, there are regrets that I can do X in language A, why can't I also do Y as in language B argh. But you gain something from all these different styles and methods. Your thinking becomes clearer, your code gets better.

This is a feature I've wanted to have for a long time, but until now I didn't know how to realize it. I wanted to have some kind of a notification area for new events on the blog, so that a returning visitor could immediately see what has changed since the last visit. And I definitely didn't want it on the sidebar, it had to be above the fold.

So the concept was in the back of my head for months, but I couldn't figure out how to make it look good. Then I came up with the idea of making it a popup window. Not a browser window, of course, just a layer that would show if there had been new events. Otherwise it wouldn't show up. Yes, that sounds like something. So with some digging and research, a bit of hacking and lots of debugging, here is the final result.

The window conveys quite a lot of information. It lists the three posts last to be published (or commented on). This way you have new posts and new comments in the same place. In the screenshot, the top entry is a post made recently. The bottom two are older posts that have received new comments.

In terms of appearance, I wanted to make the window active only if the user is using it, so on page load it is made partially transparent, onMouseOver it becomes more opaque, and onMouseOut it becomes more transparent again.

For a demo.. you have this blog. After 15 minutes of inactivity your session will expire and the window will go away. To bring it back delete your cookies from this domain (or use a different browser) and it reappears. The session is handled entirely with cookies, so for visitors who don't accept cookies, the window will always appear as if this were their first visit.

Compatibility

The opacity property is new in CSS3 and isn't uniformly supported (yet). I've tested the plugin with the following browsers.

• Firefox 1.0.1, 2.0.0.6
• Opera 8.0, 9.23
• Safari 3.0.3
• IE 5.0, 6.0, 7.0
• Konqueror 3.5.7 (opacity support is rumored to be on the way)
• Netscape 6.0.1, 7.0, 8.0.2, 9.0b3

In addition, there's a rather pesky layout bug in IE <7.0 that causes the height of the window (which is floating above the other content) to be added to the top of the page. If you fix it, please send a patch. :)

Also, I tried very hard to make sure it only consumes one query, which unfortunately made it very complicated. If you rewrite it in simpler terms, send a patch. :)

Required MySQL version: 4.1+
How to use

Download, unzip, install, append the css to your styles. :cap:

• New Posts Popup plugin @ wordpress.org
• New Posts Popup @ svn

UPDATE: Added Netscape.

UPDATE2: MySQL compatibility.

If you're a heavy ssh user, you already know about scp and rsync+ssh, but even that gets tedious when you're using the same remote location a lot.

A solution to this is KDE's fish:// kioslave, which lets you browse the remote path in konqueror much like you do any other. The drawback is that it's not an actual filesystem, so if you open a video, you'll have to wait before konqueror copies the whole file to a temporary local path before it will open it. (The same goes for smb:// samba shares, and probably all kioslaves.)

I've been using fish:// a lot, but lately it's become very flaky on me, and I don't know why, because the terse error messages don't explain anything. But I also miss how it's less convenient than nfs, which *is* a real filesystem (albeit one that is a pita to configure properly).

But there is another option. (Oh who am I kidding? This is linux, there are probably hundreds of options. :D ) If you have a remote location you need to access a lot, you could try sshfs. As the name implies, the protocol is still ssh (so the traffic is encrypted), but the interface is that of a filesystem. And it's based on fuse (the user level filesystem layer), so no messing with the kernel necessary.

Here's what you do

emerge sshfs-fuse
echo "fuse" >> /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
modprobe fuse

That should make sure the fuse module is loaded on boot. Now to mount and unmount a remote path:

sshfs host:/path /mount/point
fusermount -u /mount/point

Or, to make it even easier.. save this in /usr/local/bin.

MOUNT_POINT=/mount/point
HOST=host
MOUNT_PATH=/path/on/host

if [ ! -d $MOUNT_POINT ]; then
	echo "mount point $MOUNT_POINT missing"; exit 1
fi

if mount | grep $MOUNT_POINT; then
	echo "umounting..."
	fusermount -u $MOUNT_POINT
else
	echo "mounting..."
	sshfs -C -o transform_symlinks -o Cipher="blowfish" $HOST:$MOUNT_PATH $MOUNT_POINT
fi

I used to watch a lot of tv when I was a kid. One thing that was very common was for stations (cable stations especially) to broadcast tv shopping in the off hours. I recall TV3 did this a lot, they called it "teleshop" I think.

What strikes me is that not only has this home shopping gig not worn out yet, it hasn't even changed at all from the early 90s. And that's a bit unusual, because so many practices have been forced to evolve or become deprecated. But this tv shopping has survived. Why is this? Do they actually sell those products? Hard to believe, isn't it? I've never bought anything. In fact the very "exclusivity" of the products, how you "can't buy them in any store" raises a serious credibility issue with me.

And the funny thing is they still sell the same things! In the 80s/90s there was a well established stereotype, at least in Norway, about vacuum cleaner salesmen who would come to your house and try to demonstrate the product for you. This was a solid reference for jokes and humor programs. A bit I've seen many times is a person answering the door and before the caller has a chance to say what they want you say "no, I don't want a vacuum cleaner" and slam the door.

And yes, in the 90s they sold vacuum cleaners on tv. This is how it would go. First of all, the studio looks like one of those kitchens they used to give away for prizes in game shows. It's clean, it's very big, no dishes or kitchen ware in sight. There are two hosts. One is the product expert, who is going to demonstrate the product. The other is, usually a woman, the person who is going to exclaim amazement at every detail. They start off with a side-by-side comparison of the product on sale with some other "typical" product. So they make a mess on the floor, and the "expert" tells the woman to clean it up . She tries, and, of course, fails. Then the expert uses *his* product and it goes very well. She's very impressed. Then he starts enumerating the virtues of the better vacuum cleaner, to her wide eyed disbelief.

After that's done, he launches into a sales presentation. This is how much it costs, but we're giving everyone the special discount (which is perpetual) and so you will only pay this much. Plus shipping. And we're giving you these bonus items just because we're nice. And if you order within 10 days you'll get a complimentary cheaper-product-also-sold-on-tv. You can't beat that deal.

Then comes the black and white sequence. A woman (a different one) is shown vacuuming and she's holding a hand to her back, which means her back hurts. She's also doing a poor job of cleaning, as she misses spots here and there. This is you. It's shown in black and white to tell you that what you're doing is arcane and obsolete. And silly. Seriously, wisen up and buy this product. And now comes a repeat of the sales pitch again, without any people this time, just filming the vacuum cleaner, all the extensions you can put on it, and the special price. And the bonus gifts. And finally the list of countries and telephone numbers to call.

And if you turn on the tv today in the off hours, you'll see very same thing. The same kind of studio, the same people, the same lines, the same sequence of scenes. It's like archival footage. And they *still* sell vacuum cleaners. Now they've abandoned vacuum cleaners in the traditional sense, so they sell mops and things that clean with steam and what have you, but it's the same thing.

But how much can a vacuum cleaner really do for you? It makes cleaning easier, but it won't make you happy, will it? I like the products that make you a better person. Like pills that give you more energy, and dietary products, and skin care. It only takes a clever person to make a better mop, but it takes a doctor to examine and approve a chemical that's going to be sold to the public. If you're a doctor you can be the star on tv shopping. They bring you out, you get applause and admiration. Then you have to explain how the lotion works and why it's so fantastic. Be careful to inject some pseudo scientific terms to sound like a credible scientist. And you have to wear a white lab coat and a stethoscope, like you just came off duty at work, because who in their right mind would believe a real doctor would come on a program like this?