Lately I’ve been struggling with really terrible performance on my VirtualBox virtual machines. I’ve begun to do a bit of research on improving the performance of my VMs and so far the most helpful tip was to switch the VM disk image to SATA instead of IDE. Check out the following link for a detailed set of instructions on how to make this switch: Improving VirtualBox performance (http://matt.bottrell.com.au).

Additional Resources:

• VirtualBox 2.0.2 User Manual (PDF)

Really interesting article from Rob Pike, a member of the Unix team and Plan 9. Here’s a short excerpt from the article:

“Kernighan and Plauger’s The Elements of Programming Style was an important and rightly influential book. But sometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbook approach to good style instead of the succinct expression of a philosophy they were meant to be. If the book claims that variable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn’t it then follow that variables whose names are small essays on their use are even better? Isn’t MaximumValueUntilOverflow a better name than maxval? I don’t think so.

What follows is a set of short essays that collectively encourage a philosophy of clarity in programming rather than giving hard rules. I don’t expect you to agree with all of them, because they are opinion and opinions change with the times. But they’ve been accumulating in my head, if not on paper until now, for a long time, and are based on a lot of experience, so I hope they help you understand how to plan the details of a program. (I’ve yet to see a good essay on how to plan the whole thing, but then that’s partly what this course is about.) If you find them idiosyncratic, fine; if you disagree with them, fine; but if they make you think about why you disagree, that’s better. Under no circumstances should you program the way I say to because I say to; program the way you think expresses best what you’re trying to accomplish in the program. And do so consistently and ruthlessly.”

Rob Pike: Notes on Programming in C (doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/pikestyle)

(click for a larger view)

These don’t all really seem to necessarily be “equations” but they are all extremely useful things you should know. The article contains some details on the following:

• Binomial Coefficient
• Demorgan’s Laws
• Eigenvector and Eigenvalue
• Pumping Lemma for Regular Languages
• Information Entropy
• Bayes’ Theorem
• Fermat’s Little Theorem
• Natural Join
• The Fixed-Point (Y) Combinator
• O(N)
• Euler’s Identity

Eleven Equations True Computer Science Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know (via elegantcoding.com)

Just a few excellent responses from Stackoverflow.com to the question: “What programming terms have you coined that have taken off in your own circles (i.e. have heard others repeat it)? It might be within your own team, workplace or garnered greater popularity on the Internet.” Some examples being: “Yoda Conditions” and “Pokemon Exception Handling.”

Dodgy Coder: Programming Classics (via dodgycoder.net)

The Doom 3 source code has recently been released under the GPL license by iD Software and it appears that someone has been able to successfully build it under OS X! There is also a small/partial code review of sorts here too with plans for a complete code review in the future. Check out the article here: Doom3 compilation instructions for Mac OS X (via fabiensanglard.net)

Now here is a good article (mainly for Unix beginners) that outlines some of the most useful basic Unix commands available.  Read the article here: Unix Command Line Fu (via kresimirbojcic.com). The article covers commands such as: cut, grep, sort, uniq, cat, tac, join, tail, head, etc. It also tells you a bit about how to use each one for specific situations.This is by no means a comprehensive list, but there are many useful things here that I definitely didn’t know how to do before!

Dart is a new web programming language developed by Google. It is set to be first unveiled at the GOTO conference, which is held between October 10-12, 2011. The primary intent of Dart is to replace JavaScript. The primary goals of Dart are to solve some of JavaScript’s problems while providing increased performance and security.

• Official Website for Dart – dartlang.org
• Dart – Getting Started (dartlang.org)
• Google Dart to “ultimately … replace JavaScript” (2ality.com)

This is absolutely one of the most amazing timelapse videos I have ever seen!

Most programmers know the typical set of languages, such as C, C++, PHP, Java, etc. These are mainstream languages and used by many. However, there are hundreds or thousands of languages out there; some of which are extremely interesting and sometimes experimental in nature. Here is a quick list of some interesting languages to check out.

• Haskell
• Erlang
• Io
• PLT Scheme
• Clojure
• Squeak
• OCaml
• Factor
• Lua
• Scala
• Epilogue

To see the entire list along with some useful links and good descriptions check out the article:
10 Programming Languages Worth Checking Out (h3rald.com)