Gits and Bugs
One may wonder what was happening in the last few months. Everyone knows about the Euro-crisis. A certain Mr Erdogan has been trying to revive the Ottoman Empire, sharpening his Unix-skills, especially bashing, on Israel. Mahmoud failed to turn Judea and Samaria into a Judenrein state at the UN. It also turned out that a single Israeli soldier is worth 1027 heroic Palestinian freedom fighters. What’s more, Muammar Kadhafi, in a markedly Perl-like fashion, said:
keep $power or die $!
Yes, but what about the real important stuff, you may ask. Oh, I see what you mean! Here it is.
I needed a recursive git-grep function to scan submodules as well. So I wrote one. Along with a vim-plugin, which is a beautiful piece of plagiarism, but that’s open source for you!
http://github.com/subogero/git-grep-recursive-vim
I got acquainted with gdb, the GNU Debugger, courtesy of Richard Stallman. Typical of him, it prints 2 pages of licensing info and political agenda when started up. But after you get rid of that,
alias gdb='gdb -q'
what a brilliant piece of software it is! Easy, comfortable, fast, debugging on the command line. It’s just incredible. Gdb is a bit better explained here:
http://betterexplained.com/articles/debugging-with-gdb/
I rewrote my calculator, because one had to type too many uppercase letters for hex numbers. It’s all lowercase now. And it’s called “szg”, and no, not after my initials. It means SZámolóGép, which is Hungarian for calculator. Nothing to do with Hungarian notation, though. Which one of my colleagues turned out to actually like. Strange taste. It must give a deep satisfaction, when after 2 years of maintenance “u8Foo” has become a signed long.
Anyway the new calculator is available on github:
http://github.com/subogero/szg
At the office, I’m now co-developing a rather large project in git with a colleague. Lots of fun…
Having mentioned Muammar Kadhafi, there was a lot of hype about the death of Steve Jobs recently. A much more important person has passed away too: Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language, co-creator of Unix with Ken Thompson. As a tribute, some quotes from the two heroes:
Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Dennis Ritchie
That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty. Ken Thompson
