TuxTips

I just got my invite a couple of days ago to the beta of Stack Overflow. I'll save an in-depth review for once the site has officially launched, but I just thought I would write a quick post to say that so far I'm pretty impressed. The site is fast and well designed, and I've not run into any major bugs yet. The community seems to be solid (although not as many linux systems developers as I'd like to see) and the reputation system seems like it's well designed. This looks like it could turn out to be another good site for programmers. I'll be sure to make a post here once the site goes live, and in the mean time if any of you are already in the beta, my username is CodeninjaTim, so be sure to keep an eye out for me.

In the last article in the Journey to Python series, I had gotten as far as doing some basic math, and displaying some data to the screen. Over the last few days I've been working on two new facets of Python which will hopefully allow me to get up to speed in writing programs that are actually useful. This week I've played around a bit with reading input from the command line in a python program, as well as interacting with the operating system with the OS library; I've also had a chance to look at pydoc to get some documentation, and as per a reader request I've spent a bit of time thinking about pythons type system, and how it compares to more strict type systems in languages such as C++ and Java.
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After yesterdays rather long introduction into the whys and wherefores of my decision to learn python, today I'm going to begin to talk about my first steps into learning python. In this post I'll talk about how I fared getting up and running with python, what references I chose, and discuss my impressions after writing my first program.
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There is something that I have to admit, even though it may cost me a few geek points. I'm not fashionable. I'm not quite the old codger who things things were fine with punchcards and this internet thing is just a fad, I certainly enjoy using the latest version of $whizbang_app, and I'm happy to upgrade my hardware with acme's Greatest-Thing-Ever(tm). I was using Linux on the desktop when most people were trying to decide if they should upgrade to Windows 98, and I was running Compiz when it was just a couple of tarballs and a neat video from Novell. In certain areas however, I am far more conservative.
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/proc is often considered one of the most mysterious parts of the linux file system.  For those comming from the windows world especially, but also those who have been using Linux for years, proc seems an at times incomprehensible web of mysterious files and directories.

Understanding the mysteries of /proc can greatly aid in administrering and programming on linux systems, because proc is itself a key into the depths of the system.  In some ways, proc can be thought of as similar to the windows registry; it contains specific files that contain information about the system, and control how the system operates.

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A few days ago I decided to start learning Japanese. I expected to have a difficult path ahead of me, as Japanese is a notoriously difficult language for westerners to learn. After running up to my local bookstore, and picking up several books and CDs on the Japanese language, and getting the Adobe Shockwave plugin installed using Crossover Office (A great version of wine, I definitely recommend it if you find the vanilla wine to be too cumbersome); and making myself slightly poorer buy getting a subscription to the online version of Rosetta Stone I found myself facing a difficulty that I hadn't originally expected. My English version of Slackware with Dropline Gnome and a US keyboard layout allowed me no easy way to insert Japanese script into documents. This meant that I would have difficult learning to read and write Japanese, as well as practicing Japanese by talking with my Japanese speaking friends online.

Knowing that there had to be a solution to this problem, I set out on the internet to find out. Unfortunately, the general (and reasonable) assumption is that if you want to be able to input Japanese characters, you probably read Japanese. For someone just learning the language, I found a lot of the documentation rather incomprehensable. With some effort I figured out how to get everything working, and have here a guide that should help others who want to enable Japanese character input.
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One of the great benefits of Linux is it's extensibility. For Gnome users, one of the great ways that you can easy expand and customize your desktop is with Nautilus scripts. In this article I discuss using Nautilus scripts to enhance your Gnome experience, as well as providing a couple of starter scripts.
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I thought that today, rather than going for an in-depth tutorial, I would post a useful snippet of code for anyone out there doing GUI development with GTK+. Although Gtk+ is a nice toolkit, one thing that I found that it was lacking was a nice widget to automatically display directories. I had hoped that since it had such a nice file open dialog, there might be something out there, but alas I was unable to find anything. So, I present here a useful function to automatically populate a GtkTreeView with a directory structure.
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Hey everyone,

I just wanted to write up a quick post to apologize for the funky formatting of code in the last post.  I'm currently trying to figure out the best way to get code to look right inside of wordpress, without the WYSWYG editor fubaring it.  As I work out the best way to format code I'll be going back to fix older posts, and I hope that you'll stick with us through this refinement stage of the site.

A common development problem, and one that is becoming even more important as processors gain more cores, and computers themselves gain more processors, is the issue of concurrency. Dealing with concurrency, that is to say multithreaded programming, is vitally important for obtaining top level performance on modern systems. Even in cases where performance isn't critical, multithreaded programming (especially for GUIs) can vastly improve the user experience of an application. In this part 1 of a series on concurrent programming with C++, I examine what makes using pthreads with C++ difficult at times, and suggest two methods for easily integrating pthreads with an Object-Oriented C++ application, along with an in-depth look at pointer-to-member function syntax and in the light of this practical application.

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