This post is a detailed discussion into user profiles, their directories, and how they are—to put it bluntly—in total disarray on Windows and Linux (I haven't used a Mac in ages, but I assume the situation is very similar there, too). Applications treat the user profile as a dumping ground, and any user with a reasonably wide list of installed software will find their user profile very difficult to traverse after some time in use. There are platform conventions and attempts to standardise things on more open-source platforms, but a lot of developers resolutely refuse to change the behaviour of their software for a variety of reasons (some less valid than others).

The first part is a deep dive into user profiles on Linux and Windows, and the conventions that have been established on these platforms over the years. The second section details how they are broken on each platform, and why they are broken.

This page lets you simulate various color vision deficiencies (CVD) directly in your browser. There are many simulation methods, with varying degrees of accuracy. Several are proposed here and they all have been carefully implemented in DaltonLens-Python by reviewing the state-of-the-art and testing them against reference implementations.

most probably
NO

Earth has been a snowball and a hothouse at different times in its past. So if the climate changed before humans, how can we be sure we’re responsible for the dramatic warming that’s happening today?

In part it’s because we can clearly show the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions from human activity and the 1.28 degree Celsius (and rising) global temperature increase since preindustrial times.

But paleoclimatologists have also made great strides in understanding the processes that drove climate change in Earth’s past. Here’s a primer on 10 ways climate varies naturally, and how each compares with what’s happening now.

Fluency on the command line is a skill often neglected or considered arcane, but it improves your flexibility and productivity as an engineer in both obvious and subtle ways. This is a selection of notes and tips on using the command-line that we've found useful when working on Linux. Some tips are elementary, and some are fairly specific, sophisticated, or obscure. This page is not long, but if you can use and recall all the items here, you know a lot.

[2000-08-09]

The Joel Test

1.    Do you use source control?
2.    Can you make a build in one step?
3.    Do you make daily builds?
4.    Do you have a bug database?
5.    Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
6.    Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
7.    Do you have a spec?
8.    Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
9.    Do you use the best tools money can buy?
10.    Do you have testers?
11.    Do new candidates write code during their interview?
12.    Do you do hallway usability testing?

TeXcount is a Perl script for counting words in LaTeX documents. It parses valid LaTeX documents counting words, headers, formulae (mathematics) and floats/begin-end groups.