Sit Down and Code
At the 2012 Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium, visualization researcher Daniel Keefe offered a keynote presentation on data-intensive visualization. His work involves the design of novel interfaces to navigate complex data sets. Visualization researchers always have the best demos. Mr. Keefe expressed his frustration with programmers: they hear the problem and then they sit down and write […]
What’s the Best Text Editor?
Students ask, “What’s the best text editor?” When talking about superlatives like best and worst, we really have to narrow down our scope to have meaningful discussion. You simply can’t say, “They’re the best band ever!” You’ve not gone through all of time and figured that out. Even if we could travel through time, there’s […]
Grup
One of my colleagues has sparked our students’ interest in IRC. He and the students have been suggesting I swing by their channel, especially since I’m occasionally the topic of conversation. I applaud my colleague’s barrierlessness, but my dreams of things to do with my family and of things to code and of grant proposals […]
Restoring the Last Known Cursor Position in Vim
In unconfigured Vim, the cursor is placed at the beginning of each file that I open. When I close a file in Vim and open it again later, it’d be really nice if the cursor would automatically move to where I left off editing. And it can, with this handy autocommand: Autocommands let you write […]
Swapping first_second to second_first in Vim
When I write C code, I never know how to name functions. In an object-oriented language, my methods are verbs: add, insert, get, swashbuckle, and so on. The subject or indirect object of these verbs is an instance of the containing class, making my code read like English sentences: vector.add, list.insert, image.get, swashbuckler.swashbuckle. In C, […]
Accessing the W Drive on Linux
The university kindly provides central storage to students, faculty, and staff. We can access this storage on Windows, Mac, Linux, and through a browser. On Linux, however, we end up running into some annoyances when we work with files on the W drive. (Our H drive is easy to access; it becomes our home directory, […]
Disabling Touch and Stylus Button on Wacom Tablet in Linux
I’ve got a Wacom Bamboo tablet that I use for drawing during recorded lectures. The stylus works great, but the tablet also responds to my fingers. Touch events were firing at all the wrong times, so I disabled them. The xsetwacom utility came to the rescue: When I plug the tablet in, each input mechanism […]
See Books Listen
My office of research sent me this invitation last semester: ORSP is wondering if you would be interested in presenting at our Forum this spring. This is an opportunity for faculty or staff to present on their ongoing research/scholarly/creative activity to a broad segment of the university community. Presentations are 20 minutes to half an […]
PHP Spotting
I saw this snippet of PHP on a window in a downtown business:
The Muppet Who Was a Computer
Our machines our unswerving. They do not judge our commands. Their faithful obedience is a feature and a bug.