Reflections

Don’t smoke (Stay quit!!) : Doing great! There is no desire to smoke. After being a smoker for over a decade, I was very glad to quit, and stay quit. The way I quit this time was quite cliched. I went to Vegas, smoked incessantly for 3 days, and stopped at the end of the trip – cold turkey. Never went back to it, and quite frankly disgusted by the thought of smoking now.

Searching for symbols The product that I work on, has over 22 million lines of source – most of it a nightmare. I use vim as my editor of choice 1. Both cscope and ctags (integrated into vim), allow me to quickly move between files and lookup definitions of symbols, and help in understanding the challenge-du-jour. Throw in fuzzy find capabilities of the most awesome Ctrl+p plugin, and vim becomes the best ‘IDE’ out there!

These are notes from the official Elixir documentation. It a quick walk-through of the unique features in Elixir for someone coming from years of C — a way for me to remember and use as a reference. Summary Types Operators Control Structures Types Atoms Named contants with a value. true and false are atoms. Strings Supports unicode string natively! It’s about time. 1 You can concatenate strings using <>.

After 12+ years, I built a workstation from scratch. Hardware has come such a long way, but that is a post unto itself. Having always worked with Ubuntu and other debian variants it was time to venture into a more lean distro. I picked Arch Linux, on the recommendation of several colleagues. It’s been fun. Pacman and Yaourt are great package managers, and the rolling release model ensures access to the bleeding edge all the time.

I set myself a goal to write more this year - in fact, I attempted to do so once every week. This required me to look at my blog, which led to the inevitable: small changes in what it looked like, led to general dis-satisfcation with the current solution I have to publish my blog, which quickly ballooned into a whole host of activities. Let me step back a bit.