I surface again, back from the land of studying and cramming. I decided to study for the SCJP (Sun Certified Java Programmer) exam, since that's what I spend my time doing at $dayjob (I might as well do it as best as I can!) Yesterday I passed the exam, yay …

I decided to try out Planet Venus over the week-end, a popular blog aggregation system. The end result is pretty neat, I really like how it works (though I must say it's the first blog aggregator I ever look into.)

The documentation very sensibly insists on running all the unit …

XTerm control sequences are those sequences of characters that when typed into a terminal, can have all sort of cool side-effects. Try this one:

$ echo -e '\e[33;45mHello!'

If you're not too enthused about yellow and magenta (shame!) type in:

$ echo -e '\e[0m'

Many other neat things can …

It's proven difficult to write up a summary of my experience as someone-who's-not-a-hardcore-open-source-contributor-yet-but-certainly-plans-on-becoming-one. There's an easy dialogue-killing answer to any anecdote I relate: "suck it up." I'm still trying to find a way to express all this though, because I'm sure there's something to learn from any newcomer's attempt to …

While trying to make the archive pages of this site more useful, I had a bit of trouble working with Django's annotation feature to give me the numbers I was looking for. I wanted to show on the index page how many posts were published in a given month. This …