Category Archives: programming

Codeacademy: A resource for beginners in programming

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A new website/service has popped up, offering to teach programming skills in a “interactive, fun” and social manner. I haven’t delved into this to see it in great detail, but just perusing the lessons, it might appeal to some who might not otherwise be interested in learning to write programs.

I have a concern that the site might simply teach the skills of syntactically assembling bits of code, but forgo the deeper skills of the philosophies are designing and developing high quality software, and the parts of doing so that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual code.

Anyway, for your amusement:

Learn to code | Codecademy.

Another personal hero falls….

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Another one of my personal heroes and someone who shaped me very early on in my life as a computer scientist, John McCarthy, the Father of Lisp, has passed on. I can’t begin to imagine how I might have turned out as a CS person without discovering Lisp early in University. It has pretty much affected how I view programming as both a craft and an art form.

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So passes a real hero of the computing age

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I just heard that Dennis Ritchie passed away:

Report in google+ of Dennis Ritchie passing

Rob Pike - 8:02 PM - Public I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend. I have no more information. I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately. He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.

Dennis was co-inventor of the C Programming Language, which all modern computer operating systems are based upon, with Brian Kernighan, and co-inventor of Unix, with Ken Thompson.

The C Programming Language

The C Programming Language book

Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie

Ritchie, Thompson and Kernighan were all big heroes and inspirations for me in my early career. Their influence is great; many, many people will not ever know how much influence these people have had on their daily lives.

RIP, Dennis. :’(

Edit: Or as my friend Joe put it:

TamWiki Main/Quick Action On Select

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A new howto article in the wiki, this time some quick javascript to do an action based on the user selecting a value in a select block:

This is a quick and dirty way of getting your web page to respond to a change in value of a non-form-enclosed <select> tag. This is useful for causing changes to happen based on some specific set of values that you want to offer the user. First I will give the general form, then offer a specific example from some recent work I have done.

via TamWiki Main/Quick Action On Select.

TamWiki Main/Drop Caps With CSS

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New article in the wiki on using CSS to implement drop caps:

Drop Caps are pretty much what the name implies: the first letter of a paragraph is enlarged and dropped to the left of the first paragraph on the page. This is seen in books, newspapers, and magazines all over. It is a classic design trick that can be successfully brought to a web page to give it a bit of elegance.

via TamWiki Main/Drop Caps With CSS complete with an example.

 

Mailutils

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Command line tools for handling e-mail. Includes an implementation of the old MH system. Mailutils.

I am looking for a way to use command line mail tools that deal with mulitple e-mail accounts on different servers (incorporating mail from a remote server and routing outgoing mail to the appropriate SMTP gateway associated with the account).

I can probably cobble up something to handle incorporating mail using fetchmail and procmail, but figuring out the appropriate SMTP gateway is problematic.