Five years

It's been a while since I've used the meta-post category. I think it's a good opportunity to do so: exactly five years ago I typed "/./etc/init.d/blog start", on this same blog. Quite a long time.

I'm really surprised I've managed to keep on writing more or less regularly for five years on this blog. There are now about 360 articles on this site, which gives an average of about one per week. That's a nice metric, even if not very accurate. I spent almost a year without writing, while moving to a different country. Maybe I should start a blog about that too.

Here's for five years more!

Learning misspells: thanks Vim!

I just noticed a very silly "pattern" I usually fall into: since I like vim (perhaps a bit too much) to work with text, even free-form text like this blog post, most of the times I type a lot of text which then must be spell checked (so far I haven't found a spell checking extension I like for vim). While spell checking I correct the original text in vim, and to do this I usually search for the mispel in Vim, thus typing the wrong spelling one more time. This has the side effect of reinforcing the bad spell instead of forcing me to type the correct spelling.

I wonder how can I fix this problem without a spellchecker for vim.

An awareness test

Rant ahread: this is an old video, but it remains very instructive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ahg6qcgoay4.

It's amazing how easy it is to loose sight of a dancing bear (that sentence does make sense after viewing the video!). I wonder if that's why I dislike Windows. Too many menus, whereas I have a single interface for pretty much anything with my CLI.

Powerpoint monkey

I doubt this announcement will be of much use to anyone, but I've uploaded most of my latex presentations to my github repo (those for which I found the source code, anyway).

At least it's a great way to see crappy latex code which probably hasn't compiled in newer versions of latex for at least a couple of years.

200th post!

Yes, this is the post number 200 on this blog. Considering we are a month away of starting the fourth year, I guess that gives me quite a lousy periodicity, but I am still surprised I post somewhat regularly here after such a long time (hey, in programmer years that's like a whole life!).

Since the beginning this blog has mutated from being  my public notepad to being a place where I research new topics, or write about things that are generally interesting to me. I lost many readers for posting crazy metaprogramming stuff and for constantly babbling about Vim and Linux, but hey, I'm proud of if. Let's see what the next 200 posts bring here.

Vacations are over

Long time without updates. I guess I needed vacations from the blog. It was not the first time and it probably won't be the last one I take, but I'm back now with another truckload of C++ ramblings and misc stuff. Like this one:

Funny queries: What Google thinks of me

It's been a long time since I used the metapost category. I've been taking a look at the queries received by Google for which this blogs shows up. Some of them are quite peculiar, some of them may give us an insight of what the search engine things of me. For example:

Query	Impressions
grumpy old man	2,000
grumpy	400
grumpy man	400
ugly old man	250
grouchy old man	110
grumpy old	35
old grumpy man	70
grumpy gnome	12

There was a long list of variations to these phrases, but I didn't want such a long post. Anyway, if you thought that grumpy is all Google considers me to be, brace yourself for a surprise:

Query	Impressions
trained monkey	90
no life	90
funny troll
monkey using computer
tool monkey
congratulations monkey
monkey using tools

Basically, a computer using trained-troll monkey, with no life. Pretty accurate, some people may say.

Query	Impressions
señal de muerte	12

Literally signal of death in Spanish. Tip: Lack of pulse.

Another common search:

hang yourself	200
how to hang yourself	90
rope to hang yourself	12

I guess those searches have a very low returning rate.

This is a query which sincerely surprised me:

Query	Impressions
eliphant
eiephant
elehant
elepant
eephant
elephanth

I'll do a public service here: it's written 'elephant', buddy.

Another downgrade achieved

Oh sh....

Template Metaprogramming XVI: Appendix

I forgot but one thing about these posts: the titles. No one got the hint but they are all chapter names from one of my favorites series, Nowhere Man.

Template Metaprogramming XV: Gemini

This is the end. My only reader, the end. After 15 chapters of template metaprogramming you should have learned why staying away from them is a good idea, but if you have been following this series then you should know now when and why they could be useful.

These posts were a compendium of mostly isolated data I found during my travels through the depths of metaprogramming tricks, there are books and people much more capable than me if you want to learn more about this subject (Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu comes to mind).

The whole idea of having a cache and a virtual template method was nice, but after seeing the result I decided it was best to have a factory method and an IDL. It may not be so l33t, but whoever has to maintain the code after me will be grateful.

This is the last post on this topic because I feel I have written most, if not everything, I can transmit through this medium but also for an important reason, most likely I won't be working with C++ code so much from now on [1] so there won't be as many chances for me to see the dark, insane, side of this beautiful (in its own way) programming language in a programming language. I know most of you must have barely skimmed through these articles, but I still hope you enjoyed them.

[1] That's right, I'm leaving C++ for the dark side of development, I'll be working with Java from now on. Keep in mind this article may have been written a long time before it's published.

[2] Wow, it was a long time since I used the meta-post category

Quote of the week

It seems making a compile fail is actually quite easy. That’s what I have most experience with.

From "Template metaprogramming", chapter 10 by me

Level up!

Today it’s been 756864000 seconds of uptime since I was promoted from Release Candidate to V1.0. Hope none of you remember I made this same post 31536000 seconds ago.

I'm a pirate!

Back for round II

OK, the hiatus is over. It's not like I've been sitting around doing nothing this last couple of months... well may be I have, but now I'm back. Kind off, I'm actually going out on vacations a couple of weeks in march but the blog will be on autopilot  and there are quite a lot of posts in the backlog... there are a couple of months more worth of clever and informative (?) articles, so stay tuned (?^2).

New talk on the way

I'm polishing my latest talk, "Ninja console" which will be made available to the public soon. More news to come.

Zomg! happy (late) birthday

Can't believe it... a whole year has gone by and I didn't even notice. The frist psot was over a year ago and now with over a hundred posts in the archives, a second blog [spanish only] starting, many changes in the directions of the articles and a timidly and ever quiet growing reader base, I can say I didn't learn anything at all from the experience.

I bet that's not the kind of speech you were expecting but the message I would like to transmit today is this: to all the people trying to start a blog, do it for fun, nothing more nothing less. Don't expect any kind of epiphany (not even in a web browser form) nor a sudden burst in online popularity (what for anyway?). You may get those as a byproduct of the experience but starting a blog only for that is a recipe for boredom and frustration.

Write, for a whole year, just because it's fun

Your money or your life!

The sad truth

First Ubuntu Day in Buenos Aires

On sat. 26 of september, this saturday, I'll be on the first Ubuntu Day in Buenos Aires. Of course, I'll be a speaker there, it's time to undust the old GNU/Linux Survival Guide Again.

See you @ Ubuntu Day :)

non-vacations

After some sick time, lots of work, prepearing my new blog (monosinfinitos.com.ar, go check it) and several other,personal stuff regular blog updates will resume tomorrow and continue at least for a week. That's about the buffer size I've left, after that I'll have to write something new or take a longer vacation... we'll see.

In the meantime, enjoy a pretty picture. [BROKENLINK]