TooMeta.com

San Jose has a lot of neat, IMO, neon signs. This is one of them on San Carlos Ave.

You know those stupid animated GIFs of some stick figure digging. Well we have new sites in the works, and I want to get the links out there so the search engines pick them up.

Toonet

Toonet is a simple set of utilities for stuff I sometimes want to run off a remote computer. Now it is really easy. With toonet you can port scan, do DNS lookups, ping, and more in the future.

Toometa – Linux

This site will contain useful information about Linux. Compatible laptop hardware, etc. This info will also be submitted to http://linux-laptop.net/ and http://tuxmobil.org/

Toometa

This site will replace toometa.com. Its exact final point is still unknown and undisclosed.

LinuxRumors

This site is the one I’m least serious about this far, but I thought it was a good domain name for yet another open source software news site.

That’s something Mackey used to always say at UCSC, and I think I remember Louden saying it at SJSU too. Mackey taught CMPS12B which was sorta the wake up call/filter for all the CS majors at UCSC. The class jumped really heavily into Unix and software development tools like Makefiles and version control.

Mackey generally had no web page for his course information (notes, examples, and assignments) was in a folder on the AFS server. He wrote everything in either plain text or roff. For printing he would pass the text files through enscript. I learned how to make a man page using roff during the class too.

Oh and one of the things I liked the most was that he doesn’t accept MIME/HTML email. He has an autoreply telling you about the horrible butchering of SMTP and spreading of viruses using such things causes.

Anyway so the point is a billion new foreign things are being introduced to the students. And although he provided really great examples, that were real examples, I mean stuff you would really use not just toy code, many students were still asking for help. What does this program do? How do you use it? What happens with this input?

And his repsonse. Computer Science is a Science. Go try it out. Write a test program. Write some test input to poke at it and see what the pattern of the programs behavior is.

I don’t actually know what other scientists do. But I think this is really the best way to learn computer science stuff. If someone just tells it to you, or you just read it, it never really makes sense to you. You are never really paying attention. Go out and actually type and run the programs yourself.

I know I should be careful about judging others, but right now PeopleSoft software is a leading cause of stress in my life. Not only do they have poor Mozilla, FireFox, and Safari support. They don’t even work that well in IE:

I have now successfully registered for classes

I highly recommend everyone go see Christmas in the Clouds. I guess this movie was actually made 4 years ago, but had no distributor. It is playing now at the Camera Cinemas in downtown San Jose. The movie is an awesome comedy with some good drama and a happy ending that left me feeling better after a movie than I have in a long time. I don’t suggest looking at the official website because I think it gives away too much of the movie.

Recently I started reading Code Complete, I remember looking at the first edition of this book many years ago and thinking what would Microsoft Press know about writing code. But I actually think the book is pretty good. I started looking at it after reading a review of Pragmatic Programmer complaining that the book lacked detail and specifics. This may have been done to make the book more “timeless”, but Code Complete has a lot of details that seem to have stood the test of time. Although I’m not sure how much changed between the first and second edition, probably a lot. And later the authors ofPragmatic Programmer started their own publishing company Pragmatic Programmers which has many books on applying specific programming practices, but they do still seem to keep their theory and practice books somewhat separate.

Well this article makes a good excuse to post several amazon affiliate links and get one post ahead of Ravi.

This new watch on thingeek called the Nooka Zot Watch now lets you not only be unsure of the time, but asked the age old question is the time half full or half empty. I’m not really sure.

They also have had a binary watch if you just want to make things complicated. If binary is too much for you try the unary hour, unary decimal minute combo Ibiza LED watch.

Hmm think geek should have some kind of affialite system so we can make money off of all these gratuitous links.