"In the spirit of my last post, I decided to turn one of my favorite long comments on Hacker News into a blog post in the hopes that someone would find it useful. There was a good discussion last week about how to learn Lisp, and since I was a little late to the thread, most of the things I wanted to say had already been said. So, in an effort to pull it all together, I made a nice long summary comment, which is reproduced and cleaned up below [...]

The command nice, and its corresponding function, nice(), appear to be quite simple. A non-privileged user can “nice” a process so that it gets less CPU time. Do you know more about nice? Try the quiz below.

If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I’ve won.

– Linus Torvalds

Has Linus finally won, is Microsoft distributing software for Linux ? That’s what is claimed by Miguel de Icaza in a blog post

"In my previous post, I advocated to use Emacs as a blog post editor. This post deals with how to setup a nice blog development environment with Emacs + Firefox..."

After using so much fine open-source software, I finally released something back to the community. For a long time I intended to create or participate in a Linux project, but for some reason never got the chance to do so. Anyway, it’s not much, but here it is: Radio Tray, a simple online radio player with a very simple interface.

I've finally set up a VirtualBox session for KDE 4.1 development with Qt 4.4 installed, so I've been able to have a quick play with the new QPrintDialog, and it's a huge improvement. Hopefully I'm not stealing anyones thunder here, but I thought we should have a quick peek.

As informed in my penultimate post, I’ve contacted ISO and IEC (actually Mr. Gabriel Barta from ITTF), and he stated that he only “recommended” that the details were not revealed, and that him cannot do anything against it ( nor against Microsoft, or against this poor delegate).

As a long time Photoshop junkie and Gimp fan, this week has been a joyous overload. Gimp 2.6 released today and Photoshop CS4 has been announced (they need some time to hype before release). And again the all important question is being asked by some overenthusiastic Gimp lover whether we have finally come close to having a free, open-source Photoshop alternative.

Every so often, you read on Slashdot, Digg, or some other techie news site that Linux is finally ready for the desktop. It's finally to the point that any end user could sit down at a computer and happily compute away. The applications are sufficiently sanitized and Windows-like that even Grandma can use them.