Jonathan's Techno-tales

It’s always nice to get something for free. That’s how I feel about JSLint. Running your JavaScript code through JSLint gives you a few advantages:

• Coding style consistency — always use ; at the end of a line
• Syntax error detection — did you forget that ) ?
• Logical error detection — did you forget that var?

There’s a whole bunch of stuff JSLint will pick up for you.

It all started with CoffeeScript. Like all languages I play with, one of my first step is to look for a Vim syntax file. Thankfully, the CoffeeScript page itself links to kchmck‘s vim-coffee-script on github. So far, so good.

Here’s the first step:

2010 is over and, like last year, here’s what I read during the year:

January

nothing…

February

March

I was curious to know how many books, on average, I read a month. I don’t expose this information directly on bookpiles either. You could extract it from the RSS feed. It’s one the features I would like to add when I understand what information I want to present and how it is best presented.

In the meantime, I ran a query in the database and came up with this:

This project started out as a list of books in a text file.

When I think about a book, I think about its content, the people who talked about it and how it made me feel. Central to those thoughts is the visual representation of the book itself: its cover. A list in a text file was not the best way to think about books. Over time, I realized that it would be the kind of problem suited for a small web application.

A few years ago, when I was more into python, I stumbled on python challenge. It was great fun, I learned a bunch of stuff and it forced me to play with libraries I wasn’t familiar with.

In their own words: (about)

Python Challenge is a game in which each level can be solved by a bit of (Python) programming.

The Python Challenge was written by Nadav Samet.

All levels can be solved by straightforward and very short1 scripts.

Just after I was done writing Managing PATH and MANPATH, I stumbled on “man man” and put to rest the mysteries of MANPATH.

How it works

If MANPATH is defined, it will be used to lookup man pages.

If MANPATH is NOT defined, the manpath config file is going to be used. Depending on the OS your are using, it might be something like /etc/man.conf (Mac OS X) or /etc/manpath.config (Ubuntu).

PATH

My PATH variable used to be a mess. I have used UNIX-like systems for 10 years and have carried around my configuration files in one form or another since then.

Think about Solaris, think about /opt (or /sw), and change the order based on different requirements.

Yesterday I reached into a project I had not touched in months. When I wrote that Ruby script, it was supposed to be a one-off effort, but, as it usually goes for things like these, it had ended sticking around for much longer than anticipated.

I have RVM installed and I had installed many Rubies and done all kinds of gem manipulations. In short, the “environment” in which that project had worked was gone.

I had the “require” statements to guide me:

Reading a book takes time.

The time you spend reading a book is not spent doing something else.

Opportunity cost: (source)

Benefit, profit, or value of something that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else. Since every resource (land, money, time, etc.) can be put to alternative uses, every action, choice, or decision has an associated opportunity cost.

Does it sound obvious? Lately, however, I’ve made a few such mistakes with respect to some books I bought.