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Refine XPath results using predicate matching
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Predicates give you advanced and refined searching capabilities, allowing you to evaluate the values of attributes and the parent and child nodes of a targeted element. Rather than find a wider node set and refine or filter that set programmatically, you can add predicates to your XPaths to find exactly the nodes you want. -
The blessings of synchronised releases
2 weeks, 5 days ago
"The open source world is currently debating the merits -- if any -- of synchronising the release schedules of several of the bigger, key projects that make up a Linux distribution. The discussion was started by Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth, and continued as a back and forth between the Ubuntu leader and KDE's Aaron Seigo, but of course other members of the community discussed right along on blogs and other venues. Sander, developer of Coccinella (an open-source Jabber client) provides some insights into the whole discussion." -
The A-Z of Programming Languages: C++
3 weeks, 2 days ago
Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame dissects the history of his famed programming language. -
Embedding a File in an Executable, aka Hello World, Version 5967
1 month ago
I recently had the need to embed a file in an executable. Since I'm working at the command line with gcc, et al and not with a fancy RAD tool that makes it all happen magically it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to make this happen. A bit of searching on the net found a hack to essentially cat it onto the end of the executable and then decipher where it was based on a bunch of information I didn't want to know about. Seemed like there ought to be a better way... -
Google defends open source from 'poisonous people'
1 month, 2 weeks ago
The Case of the Self-Centered Date Parser. "Google I/O: Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Subversion, and it needed a new date parser. One day, a coder came along and wrote one. But he insisted on tagging the source code with his John Hancock. And that was against the rules. Subversion's founders said that name tags would undermine collaboration ...." -
Haiku Code Drive 2008 launched
1 month, 4 weeks ago
Haiku, an open source project dedicated to the development of a new operating system inspired by the BeOS, has launched the first Haiku Code Drive, a Summer of Code like initiative designed to sponsor students to write code for Haiku. The program is funded by the community, who also gets to choose which candidates get to be sponsored through a public poll. The Haiku Code Drive program, initially thought out to give one more opportunity to the students that applied for Haiku in the Google Summer of Code 2008 but were turned down, has a total of five candidate students/projects. Haiku is accepting donations here until May 29th, and is holding the Haiku Code Drive Poll from May 22nd through the 29th. The results of the fundraiser and the poll are scheduled to be announced on the Haiku website on May 30th. -
Use JavaServer Faces components with AJAX in Rational Application Developer
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Design a weather forecast application by using AJAX with a Relational Record List, Combo Box, Panels-Tabbed, and Data Tree components in Rational Application Developer. Also, discover a technique for accessing data elements from a Relational Record List that has two related tables. -
The 8 Essential Tools for Programmers
3 months, 2 weeks ago
What tools to you consider essential and fundamental for programmers? -
The Ruby Mendicant
3 months, 3 weeks ago
A little while ago, Gregory Brown announced his Ruby Mendicant Project. He’s trying to raise enough money to work for the Ruby community full time for 6 months (or on a time-share basis if he doesn’t raise the full amount, see the web site for the full details). With just 7 days left, he’s about 40% of the way there. This would be a good time to Make a donation. -
Steve Jobs' endangered second act
4 months, 1 week ago
"Will developers wish to tie themselves to the whims of Steve Jobs, the same way they did 25 years ago to Bill Gates--and pay a toll for the privilege of doing so to boot? Or will they spend their time working to support more open platforms, such as Android...?" -
Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits
4 months, 1 week ago
Adopt 10 good habits that improve your UNIX command line efficiency - and break away from bad usage patterns in the process. This article takes you step-by-step through several good, but too often neglected, techniques for command-line operations. Learn about common errors and how to overcome them, so you can learn exactly why these UNIX habits are worth picking up. -
What is your favorite scripting language?
4 months, 2 weeks ago
Which language reigns supreme? This is the question that seemed to create the most controversy in our Readers' Choice poll this year so we thought we'd have some fun and open it up to the public to discuss. (This is better than a vi vs. emacs war!) Cast your vote. -
TechBookReport on 'Visualizing Data'
4 months, 4 weeks ago
Trying to get a handle on large or complex datasets is not always easy or straightforward. Excel, the vehicle of choice for many people doing basic data analysis, simply doesn't cut it. And whereas there are plenty of data mining and knowledge discovery tools to chose from, many of these are designed to run in batch mode. For those interested in iteratively exploring data - in order to understand it, to extract features or discover new knowledge - the needs for interaction are essential. This is the area that Processing, (http://processing.org), seeks to address. Processing is an open-source programming language and environment for processing data and creating innovative and interactive displays for data mining and exploration. -
How to recognise a good programmer
5 months, 2 weeks ago
How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy? It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer. -
The Importance of Cross Platform Compatibility
6 months ago
I’ve gone on and on about how important cross-platform software really is in the past, and my mission to spread the word about its importance will continue. It can be frustrating to hear about a great application, become intrigued by its features and functionality, and then find out that it’s only available for one operating system. Oh, the humanity! - More News
Linux.com : Programming
Fast, powerful Geany editor offers IDE features
Geany is a lightweight text editor for Linux based on the GTK2 toolkit. Geany supports internal and external plugins, and it excels as a source code editor, since it includes basic integrated development environment (IDE) functionality. Here's an introduction to using Geany's built-in features, including the IDE and built-in development capabilities.
Lessons learned from NCSU FOSS class
Free and open source software (FOSS) is only beginning to find a foothold in computer science departments in North America. FOSS tools may be used in teaching or be the subject of research or special committees, but few departments include courses that introduce students to the FOSS community. As a result, when North Carolina State University created a FOSS graduate course in the 2008 spring semester, it turned to Red Hat to find an instructor with a suitable background of FOSS involvement and university teaching experience. Community manager Greg DeKoenigsberg recommended performance tools engineer Will Cohen, who now looks back at the experience with an eye to how what he and his students learned might help other instructors.
Version labeling is out of control
Anybody who spends time trying new free software applications and distributions will soon notice that version numbering and labeling is next to meaningless. These days, versioning rarely gives an accurate idea of the state of development, except relative to other builds of the same project. It is simply a label that distinguishes one build from another. That's too bad, because a properly labeled release can give users a sense of how advanced the build actually is.
An introduction to CGI scripting with Python
Mention Common Gateway Interface scripting to a Web developer, and their first response is likely to be "I use Perl." While Perl has long dominated the CGI scripting world, there are other, and perhaps better, tools available. In this tutorial we'll take a look at CGI scripting with Python, a fast, versatile, multi-platform language.
Book review: Open iPhone Application Development
Johnathan Zdziarski's book Open iPhone Application Development is a guide writing applications for the iPhone without engaging the restrictions of Apple's official software development kit (SDK). The book takes readers on a concise tour of iPhone jailbreaking, setting up the free compiler tool chain, writing basic Objective-C apps, and the available libraries and APIs. Apple might not like this book, but if you need to develop for the iPhone or just want to learn more about how it works, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better practical resource.
OOo Basic crash course: Creating a simple application launcher
In previous installments of the crash course, you've learned how to build a simple basket tool, a task manager, and even a word game. This time, let's take a look at how you can use the skills you picked up from those exercises to create a simple application launcher, which will allow you to start virtually any application without leaving the convenience of OpenOffice.org. While working on this project, you'll learn how to create and use functions, handle errors, and how to populate list boxes using records from a database table.
How everyone wins with open source software
Recently, I wrote a review of the note-taking application Tomboy. Though I find Tomboy exceptionally useful, I had a minor issue with the inability to create new notebooks from within a note. Within hours of the review appearing on Linux.com, Boyd Timothy, one of the app's developers mentioned in the article's comments that my idea had merit and said he would add the feature to an upcoming build. True to his word, he did. This is a shining example of one of the most valued yet sometimes overlooked features of open source software: it really is for the people, by the people.
Scripting with Scheme Shell
Last month, Daryl Lee gave us a taste of the language Scheme in the article It's time to learn Scheme with a C++ code generator. This time we will be looking at some practical examples written with Scheme Shell (SCSH): finding and replacing text in a bunch of files, sorting files in two different ways, and converting data from a CSV file to an HTML file.
Kernel hacker and Red Hat driver maintainer Jon Masters (video)
Hey, it's dirty and unglamorous coding, but somebody's got to do it. Jon Masters is one of the people who do Good Things for GNU/Linux but get little recognition for their work outside of a small circle of friends. But if you take a look at his personal page you'll immediately realize that Jon, like many inner-circle Linux developers, has many interests besides programming. And despite his many serious accomplishments, as this casual video interview (shot at the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit) clearly shows, he doesn't take himself too seriously.
Bdale Garbee: A fascinating 'open source celebrity' (video)
Let's get the first Bdale question out of the way right now: no, he didn't sell half the vowels in his name. His birth name was Barksdale, later shortened to B'dale, then to Bdale. The next thing you notice (in person) about Bdale Garbee is his size. He's a very large person. But all that aside, look at his personal home page and Wikipedia entry and you'll realize that this man is one of the most prolific contributors to Linux and open source in the world. Besides all that, he's nice (and often funny), too.
Laura Thomson on coding, the workplace, and FOSS
Ever since Laura Thomson wrote her first program in the fourth grade, coding has been a major part of her life. Over the years, she has been a lecturer in computer science at RMIT University in Australia, a principal at OmnTI, a consulting company that designs Internet systems, a trainer of other programmers, the co-writer of PHP and MySQL Web Development and MySQL Tutorial, and a frequent speaker at free and open source conferences. She is currently a senior software engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, where her recent work includes the API for the Add-ons Manager on Firefox 3. With this background, Thomson has strong views on coding, its future, and its place in business, especially where free and open source software (FOSS) is concerned, which she shared with Linux.com at the recent Open Web Vancouver conference.
Tim Bray provides a bridge between Sun and developers
"I'm a genuine old fart," says Tim Bray as he looks back at his three decades in computing. Widely known for his standards work on XML and the Atom syndication format, at an age when many former developers have moved entirely into management, he seems to have found a niche that takes advantage of his experience. As director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, his job is to keep current with Web and general programming and to encourage adaptation of new developments within the corporation. At the recent Open Web Vancouver conference, Bray talked to Linux.com about how he fills his role at Sun, and the trends he sees in computing.
Creating charts on Web pages with Java and GChart
The Apache-licensed GChart utility lets you quickly generate nice-looking charts on your Web site.
Rt2x00 project for wireless nearing success
If you use wireless networking in GNU/Linux with native drivers, then chances are that you benefit from work done by the Rt2x00 project. You may use the MadWifi Atheros drivers with OpenHal, or drivers for the Realtek RTL8180 chipset, but most likely you use one of the drivers developed by the Rt2x00 for Ralink chipsets. In the nearly four years since the project began, its work has moved from having a reputation for bugginess to the point where some of its drivers are now part of the latest Linux kernels. Recently, Linux.com talked to three of the lead developers on the project about where Rt2x00 has been and where it is going.
Open source testing tools target varied tasks
Testing is an important function of the software development process, no matter how big or small the development project. But not every company or developer has access to professional testing tools, which can run into hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The good news is that they don't need them, thanks to the tons of freely available open source software testing tools.
Three ways to test Web form input with a CAPTCHA
Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.
It's time to learn Scheme
Have you ever peeked into one of those bazillion .el files in your Emacs installation's lisp folder and wondered what it meant? Or have you ever looked at a GIMP script .scm file and scratched your head over all the parentheses? Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in common use, and Scheme is a streamlined dialect of Lisp. Many universities use Scheme as the language to introduce students to the Computer Science curriculum, and some of their teaching methods are based on the assumption that Scheme is the one language they can count on their students knowing. Even so, many active programmers and system administrators are unfamiliar with Scheme. This article will get you on your way to adding this tool to your developer or sysadmin toolkit.
OOo Basic crash course: Creating a simple game using strings in a database
Just because OpenOffice.org Basic is designed to automate mundane tasks doesn't mean that you must use it only for serious work. It's a programming language after all, and nothing stops you from using it to write something fun. Today we'll use it write a simple game where you have to guess a word, a letter at a time, from among words you've stored in a Base database. Although this is not a particularly sophisticated game, it contains a couple of string manipulation techniques and a clever trick for picking a random record from a database, which you might find useful when writing your own macros.
FOSS helps Krugle help developers search for code
In three years, Krugle, the company behind the code search engine of the same name, has gone from an idea to a company that's starting to produce revenue. CEO Steve Larsen, a veteran of half a dozen startups, attributes this brief time to market as being due largely to free and open source software (FOSS). According to Larsen, FOSS has shaped most aspects of the company, including its hiring practices and relations with business partners and users.
Better source control for your coding projects
The proper use of source control systems is a critical skill for programmers to have, and something that many of them have to pick up through observation, trial, and error in the workplace. For students, or people who primarily program as a hobby, the learning process can be particularly slow and painful. Here are some examples and discussion on the best practices you can use to avoid common source control pitfalls.
