<p>For those of us who remember when the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro">BBC Micro</a> was the home computer with the fastest Basic implementation available, a long time ago, and was pretty legendary in home computing circles in Europe. It didn’t sell that much outside of the UK, mostly because of its price. It was also the target system for the original implementation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%29">Elite</a>. <a…
<p>Admittedly I’m not the biggest fan of <a href="http://git-scm.com/">git</a> - I prefer <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of <a href="http://msysgit.github.io/">Git for Windows</a> is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a…
<p>Visual Studio 2013, much like its predecessor Visual Studio 2012, also “features” the SHOUTY uppercase menus. Like in Visual Studio 2012, these can be <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zainnab/archive/2013/08/21/visual-studio-2013-turn-off-the-uppercase-menu.aspx">turned off using a registry setting</a>.</p>
<p>Phil Hagelberg published an interesting <a href="http://technomancy.us/172">blog post about the Ergodox keyboard</a>. I’m a self-confessed input hardware nerd and have been a <a href="http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage-for-pc-mac/">Kinesis Ergo/Advantage</a> user for over a dozen years now. I love those keyboards - otherwise I wouldn’t keep buying them - but Phil makes a very good point that they’re bulky, not something you quickly throw into a bag and take with you…
<p>The Gnu Emacs for Windows distribution appears to be pretty good at inferring where a reasonable place for $HOME is, straight out of the box. In my case, said reasonable place was %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming which was an entirely acceptable default.</p>
<p>Throwing caution into the wind this morning, I’m having an updatefest only a few hours after the software was released:</p>
<p>If you look at really productive programmers - like the top 10-20% - there are usually a couple of characteristics that they share. Aptitude and in-depth understanding of both the system they are working on and the technologies involved is obviously one very important factor. Another factor that tends to be overlooked is that these programmers are also masters of their tools in the same way that a master craftsman - say, a carpenter - is also a master of their tools. That includes potentially…
<p>The default installation of msysgit (aka the official git client for Windows) is unfortunately built without python support. There are understandable reasons as to why this is, starting with “where the heck do I find the various python versions on Windows”. For me the problem was that I needed <a href="http://git-scm.com/docs/git-p4">git-p4</a> to extract some code history out of a Perforce repository and guess what, git-p4 is written in Python. Only solution for me was that I had…
<p>I generally don’t post that much about the tools I use as they’re pretty standard fare and most of the time, your success as a programmer depends more on your skills than on your tools. Mastery of your tools <em>will</em> make you a better software engineer, but if you put the tools first, you end up with the cart before the horse.</p>
<p>… make sure that you have removed all dependencies on the project that you are about to remove before you remove the project from the solution.</p>
