This should, of course, be subtitled "Books Not To Read If You Are Me." These aren't necessarily bad books (in fact, both of them are good books) but they weren't that useful to me or to people in exactly my situation. Take this with as much salt as you feel …
I just finished reading two different books on software development and management; both are highly recommended.
First, and best is "Peopleware", by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. This is another one of those must-read books. I've been telling everyone that I can't believe I've been allowed to have the job …
If you're in the business of developing software, you should read the "Joel on Software" book. Period.
(Shortest review I've ever written.)
While I don't agree with everything Joel has written, I find most of what he writes to be a clear exposition of common-sense approaches to managing software development …
I'm attempting to set up Duplicity as a backup tool, running from cron over ssh, to backup my home directory to another server.
I of course already have password-less SSH set up to connect to that server, and use ssh-agent to store the passphrase for my SSH key, as described …
It generally works pretty well, but I found the following problem, and Google was no help:
Building the VMware VmPerl Scripting API.
Using compiler "/usr/bin/gcc". Use environment variable CC to override.
Unable to compile the VMware VmPerl Scripting API.
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The VMware VmPerl Scripting API was not installed. Errors …I'm transitioning my daily work desktop from OS X Leopard to Kubuntu Hardy. (I'll be writing more about that in the future.) My job is split between managing people and doing development and system administration for a bunch of Ubuntu boxes, so running the same platform that I'm administering makes …
I just finished "Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers)" by Michael T. Nygard, from The Pragmatic Programmers. This isn't the book I thought it was when I bought it, but it's still a really valuable read. "Release It!" focuses on (and most of the author's experience seems …
I'm having a ... crisis of confidence isn't the right word, but I'm not sure what is. Let me set the stage. I work at a spectacular place, and have a job I care deeply about.
The success of our company depends on my performance. If I do my job poorly …
for afile in /home/auser/adirectory/*; do echo $afile; done
Useful for all kinds of things. And I can never remember how the syntax changes between doing a for statement in a bash script and doing it as a one-liner on the command line.
I recently interviewed a very intelligent, capable programmer who was near the start of his career. I decided not to make him an offer, and he sent a very nice follow-up e-mail asking for tips on how to present himself better. I figured my reply might be very useful to …