Author: Kyle Cordes

Dual Monitors – Worth Every Penny

As I write this in 2006, it is a very late post. Back in January 2003, I got a major PC upgrade: two 19″ LCD monitors and a dual-DVI video card to drive them. This was somewhat less common (and much more expensive) in 2003 than today. The monitors are “Samsung SyncMaster 191T”. I took this photo at the time, meaning to post it:

Dual monitors are a remarkable productivity tool – I am confident that this upgrade paid for itself within the first few months of use. Another developer here at Oasis Digital uses three screens; I’m planning to go that direction, or two larger screens, next time I upgrade. I’ve since moved to a faster computer, but I’m still using these monitors.

For best results, don’t even think about plugging LCDs in to analog VGA – the difference between analog and DVI is immediately visible and stark. I’ve seen many sources online claim that DVI is only a minor improvement; I find this unfathomable.

I use and recommend Ultramon for making best use of multiple screen – it seems to work better than the similar software which ships with some video cards.

Reimplementing Good Ideas

A while back, Weiqi posted about Eric Burke‘s comments about Wikis; one point being that “WikiWordLooksStupidAndAreNotNormal”. I mostly agree with that, and the Wiki tool we’ve been using recently, MediaWiki, supports non-WikiWords trivially. Eric is working on new Wiki software that sounds quite compelling.

The notion of needing some new software with which to set up a Wiki-repository for misc. project-related information seems a little behind the times. I set such a thing seven years ago, in 1999 – and it was old news then.

I have a personal aversion to re-solving such a well solved problem; it feels like duplication, which I have deep aversion to in code, to the extent I’ve held on to this snippet from a post by Ryan King on the TDD mailing list in 2002:

“So, duplication sucks. The more rabidly a person hates duplication, the more I trust their opinions on managing information. A programmer, upon noticing some redundancy, should be thrown into a panic, begin hyperventilating, and stammer something about “¡El diablo! !El diablo está en mi software!”.”

And yet… I have done such things myself many times – for a while in my early days of programming, I implemented a text editor a couple of times each year. There’s something deeply valuable in the experience of building something yourself, I think it is a mistake to dismiss such efforts as “Not Invented Here”.

Going to RailsConf. Be wary of software religion.

I’m going to RailsConf 2006 in Chicago next month:

The interesting thing about this is that I signed up before I knew how popular it would be – it sold out in a few days, so the pent-up demand must have been remarkable. More remarkable is that it sold out long before the full list of speakers and talks was released (or even existed). Me and 500 other people didn’t even need to know what/who would be there, to decide to go. For me, that is because I have a project going that uses Rails, and I generally enjoy software conferences, and this one is close.

But maybe there is more. Is Ruby+Rails a fad? A cult? I nearly always enjoy the Ruby on Rails Podcast, but its intro music proudly and bizarrely claims that “we’re building a religion”.

I don’t know who “we” are, but I’m not on board with that.

Assembly code from 1994, proto-DSL

Tonight I came across a chunk of x86 assembly code that I wrote for a university class in 1994. I present it here in its original form, complete with 1994 file modification date:

KSPOOL.zip

The thing I notice about this code in retrospect is that I used a macro (this was assembled with a macro assemler) to make some menu-key-dispatch code succinct and declarative in its appearance. This is quite low-level but in a sense not all that different from the “domain specific language” idea which has grown popular recently.

LVM (Logical Volume Management) – a very good thing

This Mailing list post from a user of “MythTV” reminded me of the wonders of LVM (Logical Volume Management) which is built in to Linux (HowTo, Resource page).  I first saw LVM years ago on a commercial Unix, and didn’t quite understand the point.  Now I see the point clearly, and set up most new machines with LVM.

If you’re not using LVM, and you have non-trivial storage hardware (more than one hard drive), now is the time to start.

On an OS without LVM built in (as I am, on my Windows machines..), it is often necessary to do things offline, with external tools (like Partition Magic) that could be done online in a running system with LVM.

St. Louis Code Camp – Lua Talk Notes and Source Code

At the St. Louis Code Camp on May 6, I gave a talk that was somewhat poorly titled “Painless Scripting with Lua”.  The topic more mostly about the overall use of scripting as a configuration and extension mechanism, with Lua as an example language.
The talk had no slides, only code and a 1-page handful with some notes. You can download the source code: 2006_code_camp_lua.zip and the notes follow:

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