I’m just starting to learn about printing in GTK+. The documentation provides a good API reference, but is a bit intimidating, and I didn’t find much in the way of sample code. There’s a sample called “printedit” in libegg, but it is somewhat out of date. I updated it for renamed functions [...]

I’m still making progress towards a new release on Nonpareil.  Sometimes it seems like the more work I do, the more I find that needs to be done.

I used LVM to increase the size of a logical volume containing an ext3 fileystem from 300GB to 500GB. After expanding the logical volume, it is necessary to expand the filesystem to use the added space. In theory, this can be done online (while the filesystem is mounted) by using the resize2fs command. [...]

I just got a refurbished Apple Mac mini, with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is mainly intended for use compiling my open source programs such as Nonpareil for Mac OS X. I am extremely surprised at the user experience of booting Mac OS X Leopard for the first time, [...]

The most recent release of my Bare Bones interpreter made identifiers case-insensitive, and added an optional peephole optimizer that recognizes a common idiom:

while N not 0 do;
  decr N;
  incr X;
end;

Such a loop adds N to X, clearing N in the process. Without the optimizer, this is has time complexity [...]

Over the weekend I finished the homework assignment for the “Theory of Computation” chapter of Computer Science: An Overview, Ninth Edition, by J. Glenn Brookshear. Brookshear defines a very minimal programming language called Bare Bones, in which variables may contain arbitrarily large non-negative integers. The only operations available are:

clear var; — set a [...]

University of East Anglia researchers have received a grant of half a million dollars to develop lip reading software.  [h/t Slashdot Science]

Scott Berkun points out that the software industry invents an amazing number of new development methodologies, and proposes a few new ones.  Actually he’s just documenting existing practices.  More are listed in the comments.

The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine!
Judge Kimball has ruled in SCO v. Novell that SCO does not own the Unix copyrights, and therefore most of SCO’s claims against Novell are dismissed. SCO has to waive claims against IBM and Sequent, and also owes Novell a lot of money (in [...]

You might think that vaporware is a relatively new thing. Perhaps the best known example is Duke Nukem Forever, which was announced in 1997 but still has not shipped. It received Wired News’ Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.
Vaporwear has actually been around much longer: Project Xanadu was announced in 1960, and [...]