Indeed. What do we do? Well I was curious. WTF you might say. "You're a programmer! Shouldn't you know what you do?" Well yes, I know what I do. What I mean is what do programmers do while programming besides programming. I myself write the codes (duh) and hang out on Twitter and listen to podcasts, watch movies, listen to music, and sometimes I just concentrate so hard I forget to eat. I was curious to see what everybody else did while hacking;…

Anybody who blogs about programming related topics needs to post code at times. When I was on Wordpress, I used the WP-CodeBox plugin. It worked quite well, but it was server side. This is fine if you intend to stay with your software forever, but when I moved off Wordpress to my custom solution, it became a problem. syntaxhighlighter syntaxhighlighter is a fairly popular solution, and for good reason. It is entirely javascript based so there is…

So I have this blog. You might have one, but odds are, we aren't using the same system. Well, actually since I run my own system, there is probably no way in hell we are running the same system. Anyway. There are a few other systems out there, I'm thinking of moving my other blog off my own server, and want to do some other stuff, so naturally I want to find out about some of these other systems out there. I'm only doing hosted services, since t…

Hopefully you didn't notice much, except the speed increase, but my blog is no longer on the behemoth that is Wordpress. While Wordpress served me well for quite some time on my other blog it always kind of bugged me. Well no more! I took a couple days (basically 2 full days and 2 evenings) and wrote my own little blogging engine from scratch. You can find it on github and get forking if you so choose. What I used: ruby and sinatra They are pret…

Have you check out Google Sets? It's great. I really don't know how long it's been around, but it's pretty slick. If you were looking for server names, like in this serverfault question, you'll realize the power of Google Sets. Go there, and try out a few things, like characters from Star Wars. Enter in Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Oh look, the rest of the cast, and even some obscure ones! So the next time you need a set of things, like for a ne…

Need to send email from your web app? Don't want to use Gmail because of limits? Okay I'm not about to break into a marketing campaign, because I just found the website, but it looks like AuthSMTP solves the problem. I literally just discovered this place, but you can send up to 1000 emails a month (100MB data), for $24USD a year. Not too bad. You can send with your own from address, etc, etc, and all the things you'd expect (at first glance any…