“Go analog. (e.g. cooking, hiking, astronomy, etc.) Stay healthy. (e.g. weight loss, RSI, etc.) Embrace the uncomfortable. (e.g. stop using a mouse, use Dvorak, try a different OS, etc.) Learn a new programming language. (e.g. scala, erlang, haskell, OCaml, Prolog, etc.) Automate. (build a robot, lego mindstorms, arduino boards, shell scripting, etc.) Learn more mathematics. Focus on security. (e.g. use KeePassX, PasswordSafe, set up SSL in Apache, encrypt your USB drives, etc.) Back up your data. Learn more theory. Engage the arts and humanities. (e.g. Painting, sketching, music, film, etc.) Learn new software. (e.g. try 3D modeling, use LaTeX, etc.) Complete a personal project.”

“As most software and creative professionals know, coffee is an important technology for boosting mental acuity and maintaining peak on-the-job performance. But did you also know that coffee can be a damn tasty beverage? It’s true. All you need is the appropriate amount of disrespect for the mainstream coffee industry and a desire to enjoy a better beverage. So read on, and learn the secrets to great coffee.

& - This causes the application to run in the background. You will get a new shell prompt after issuing this command.

By now most users should have the new Google bar, however if you don’t follow these instructions.

A really interesting in-depth question was posted over at stackoverflow.com asking why 1 loop seems to be so much slower than 2 loops. The discussion on the page goes into great and interesting detail on what’s going on behind the scenes and why there is such a decrease in speed between 1 and 2+ loops. Interestingly, it seems that the answer has something to do with the CPU cache and the way it handles the memory.

Now here’s a really interesting feature article on Unix history and how it came to be. It’s quite amazing how successful a piece of software has become and how it came to influence the world of computing in the past (roughly) 40 years.

Lately I’ve been struggling with really terrible performance on my VirtualBox virtual machines. I’ve begun to do a bit of research on improving the performance of my VMs and so far the most helpful tip was to switch the VM disk image to SATA instead of IDE. Check out the following link for a detailed set of instructions on how to make this switch: Improving VirtualBox performance (http://matt.bottrell.com.au).

Really interesting article from Rob Pike, a member of the Unix team and Plan 9. Here’s a short excerpt from the article:

(click for a larger view)

Just a few excellent responses from Stackoverflow.com to the question: “What programming terms have you coined that have taken off in your own circles (i.e. have heard others repeat it)? It might be within your own team, workplace or garnered greater popularity on the Internet.” Some examples being: “Yoda Conditions” and “Pokemon Exception Handling.”