monk_the_dog

Just tried it and my first impression is: "this was built for me! I love it!". One bit of friction: I'm in vi mode. I hit 'f' to follow links. Apparently I need to hit 'i' before it will accept input. It would be better if it started in insert mode. Example: 'f' followed by 'g' just prints 'pressed key g'.

Two lesser known books that I enjoyed: 1) "Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers", and 2) "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal".

One thing I learned from the "Colossus" book was the contribution of British engineers to early computers (Tommy Flowers in particular). They didn't get the credit they deserved because their work was kept secret for so long.

rr is my goto debugger. It opens up new super-powers for debugging scripts. Consider this gdb script:

  b broken_1_in_1000_times_at_random.cpp:1
  c
  b usually_runs_normally.cpp:1
  reverse-continue

And now step through forward to figure out what went wrong. This tool is worth your time to learn. There are a couple of minor annoyances (you can't re-use existing gdb scripts that contain the "run" command because the inferior is already running, but there are workarounds. Here's what I use:

  python
  import gdb
  class MyRunOrContinue (gdb.Command):
      """Run inferior if not already running, otherwise continue (useful for rr)."""

      def __init__ (self):
          super (MyRunOrContinue, self).__init__ ("just-go", gdb.COMMAND_USER)

      def invoke (self, arg, from_tty):
          if gdb.selected_inferior().pid != 0:
              gdb.execute('continue')
          else:
              gdb.execute('run')

  MyRunOrContinue()
  end

There are a few other minor annoyances, but all in all a great tool.

I'll have to add some of these to my list of quotes that emacs greets me with. Current list:

  (defvar scratch-quotes
  (list
   "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. - Mike Tyson"
   "Look, I made a hat...where there never was a hat. - Finishing the hat, Sondheim"
   "Just fucking figure it out."
   "The universe is not here to please you. - Charles Murtaugh"
   "Your life is your life. The gods await to delight in you. - Bukowski"
   "Join the force and get a pension. - Salesman"
   "Beware of things that are fun to argue. - Eliezer Yudkowsky"
   "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the result. - Winston Churchill"
   "Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. - John Von Neumann"
   "Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking. - Bill Venables"
   "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value. - Joe Biden quoting his father"
   "Most haystacks do not even have a needle. - Lorenzo"
   "Experiment and theory often show remarkable agreement when performed in the same laboratory. - Daniel Bershader"
   "The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men. - George Eliot"
   "It is astonishing what foolish things a man thinking alone can come temporarily to believe. - Keynes"
   "The purpose of computing is Insight, not numbers. - Richard Hamming"
   "Work on stuff that matters. - Tim O'Reilly"
   "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. - Teller"
   "You have to say something. It can't all be technique. - Woody Allen (on great actors)"
   ;; Paraphrased from a HN comment
   "Perfectionism is a failure to optimize across a complex goal space, settling, instead, on ignoring the difficult prioritisation problem in favor of over-optimizing a limited set of tangible and easily-defined goals over longer-run priorities" 
   ))

Oodbs used a similar technique to translate addresses from a large "global" address space into smaller "local" one. Here is a paper if you're interested (ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/swizz.ps). Did you discover this technique on your own? At any rate, very cool.