Software

FlagrandDisregard has many Flickr toys available, one of which is Scout: Find your photographs in Flickr's Explore

Just type you user name, and you get a ranked array of square thumbnails. Neat.

It's here http://www.houserdesign.com/flickr/ and shows one pagefull of thumbnails by username, photoset, group pool. Great! Could this thing show my contact's favorites?

Whenever I need to write clients, servers, servents, or middleware, that is, software communicating through the network, I use the C++ ACE Network Programming Toolkit. Why? Because it's so well done that all the stuff you need to include in such software is already there, allowing me to focus on what it has to do and not on the underlying machinery.

The features I like and use the most are:

• abstracted, handler-based network IO and IPC
• event-processing tasks run by an arbitrary number of threads in pools
• concurrent access to data structures

It's portable, comes with source, and includes the best patterns from the practice of its authors. Which is the key, really: building software on layers that provide the know-how and experience of its designers. The learning curve is steep, but I'm used to that.

I found out about it it while working on automated RSS feed indexing at Net2one.

I usually work with several Linux or Windows computers, multiple monitors, and instead of having several keyboards and mice on the desktop, it's very useful to have a kind of virtual KVM, that is, software that allows you to command another computer with a single keyboard and mouse.

Just install Synergy on each, configure which screen goes to the right and to the left (or up and down if you've got a wall of them), and just switch machines by moving the mouse between screens.

I'm frequently hired to understand, restructure, reengineer, reorganize, repair C/C++ software - sometimes I have to completely rearchitecture the things.

Over the years, I've collected a set of tools that help me search, manage, slice and transform tens of thousands of code lines. Since I work both on Unix/Linux and Windows, I need my tools to run on both platforms.

The main tool is GNU Emacs. Its programming language modes, dynamic completion, directory editing, comparison features make it the most useful all-around tool. It has been extended in so many ways that there's not much it doesn't know how to do. On Windows you may use Cygwin's version, else a very good quality port is available as natively-compiled binary: the latest version is 21.3. That's usually the first software I install anywhere, if it's not there already. It is the most perennial software I've ever used: I started using the original Teco version on a DEC-20, and the Lisp Machine version, in the 80s.

Always on Windows, I complement it with Cygwin, which offers all the Unix stuff that Emacs may need to call, like grep, find and the rest.

The next thing I need to to is navigate the software. Here Source Navigator is an excellent performer: searching, cross-referencing, call trees, you name it. Cygwin and Source Navigator were originally written at Cygnus Software.

What's next? Usually, debugging. Here I always find myself downloading the following Windows specific tools: Dependency Walker, Sysinternals' Process Explorer, File Monitor or TCPView.

In some harder cases, I use IntellectualHeaven's StraceNT to trace system calls, and Microsoft's Windbg to do postmortem or remote debugging.

On Linux, all this stuff is readily available: gdb, ldd, strace, lsof...

Works inside IE: http://osx.portraitofakite.com/

Simply great.

Back when I was a teenager and I had no computer of my own, it was rare to see a screen and keyboard on office desktops. If I saw one and there was nobody in front of it, I invariably thought it was a waste.

Now that computers are everywhere, with a few of them in my computer cabinet, I've been thinking about using the unathomable quantity of idle computing cycles, free disk space and communication bandwidth that remains untapped, behind firewalls.

I know, in public view there's all the file sharing networks, BitTorrent, Skype, SETI@home, the RSA challenges, the ACM's World Community Grid, many research projects, and efforts in peer-to-peer, distributed grid computing are growing in power.

As a programmer, I've been following distributed programming environments like Mozart or multi-agent simulation systems like NetLogo, and of course Bill Joy's JXTA and Jini.

AIM plagues you with popups and ads.  I use it to communicate with, of all things, iChat AV.  I tried iVisit and Triillian, but AIM despite its defects manages to work with Apple users of the other side, so I don't really have any choice, yet.

When AIM starts it fills your desktop with huge annoying windows, even starts noisy clips.  What a pain!

I just found a way to keep it to its main windows and not overflow all over my screen: AIM Ad Hack by Cuban-Aftermath software.  Great!

Anyway: video for Skype, quick!

I'm a long time Emacs user, since the early 80's in fact, the TWENEX days. When GNU Emacs appeared on Unix, it became my main tool.

My main e-mail archive is a set of MH folders, and I've been using Kazu Yamamoto's great Mew mail reader because of its multilingualism and nice handling of MIME.

Recently, after leaving it unused for many months, I finally switched to my Gmail account. POP and SMTP interfaces worked fine with Thunderbird, my other e-mail software, but not yet with Mew.

Now it does! I found a sample configuration on Dead Poet Weblog, the only thing I could read on the page was the Lisp bit, all the rest is in Japanese.

I downloaded installed Mew's 4.2 version, installed stunnel wiith a single urpmi stroke, just had to add one line to my .emacs and it was up and running: