It’s been said before, and Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite says it again: The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career is to improve your ability to communicate.
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How to be a New Media Douchebag
The video New Media Douchebags in Plain English was posted back in October, but it’s new to me and might be new to you:
The video’s four-step program for becoming a new media douchebag is pretty simple:
- Don’t do any real work.
- Talk, type, tag, text and Twitter a lot of stuff. The greater the volume, the better!
- Be sure to hate a lot of stuff. And tell folks!
- Celebrate the other new media douchebags out there.
According to Valleywag — for whom the four-step program above could count as a mission statement — New Media Douchebags in Plain English is a parody of Google’s Google Docs in Plain English .
Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick: “Google can reorder search and news results from the last day, week, a few months, or entire year by adding a small string to the end of the search URL. Just add this string — &as_qdr=d — to the address bar and hit enter. You’ll get a custom drop-down box that lets you re-order results based on date.”
What They Don’t Tell You About Starting a Startup: “Most of the times when we discuss startups, we only discuss success stories. We just see the end result of entrepreneurs making multi-million dollars. We talk about what a great life that entrepreneur must be living now. We always neglect the other side of entrepreneurs’ life. The painful life.”
The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment: “I’ve toyed with Linux since 2002, when I first installed Mandrake. With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being used easily by the mainstream. So, I tricked my grudging girlfriend Erin into sitting down at a brand new Ubuntu 8.04 installation and performing some basic tasks.”
I’ve played Assassin’s Creed only on XBox 360 and I don’t recall the procedure to quit the game being as byzantine as it is on the PC version, shown below:
How to Get Skype Running on Your 64-Bit Linux Box: If you’re running Linux on a Core Duo or AMD64-based machine, you haven’t been able to run Skype on it…until now! If you’ve got a 64-bit machine running the latest Ubuntu — version 8.04, a.k.a. “Hardy Heron”, enter the following on the command line and you’ll be Skyping away (and not just text chat, but audio and video as well): sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32asound2; wget -O skype-install.deb http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu; sudo dpkg -i --force-all skype-install.deb; (there’s also stuff for getting Skype to work on previous 64-bit Ubuntus and dealing with a webcam that refuses to work).