Valgrind
comprises a bunch of very useful tools for detecting problems with your programs. I first came across it a couple of years back and find it to be excellent. In particular I use its memory profiler, which helps you catch errors such as memory leaks and invalid accesses.
My git workflow
I cannot praise the revision-control tool git highly enough, and often use it as a buffer between SVN and me. Much of my professional work flow involves fixing a bug here, fixing a bug there — lots and lots of small changes in many different branches. git is the perfect tool for this kind of work. And it is fast.
php and EXIF data
A colleague at work gave me the idea of storing metadata for each photo on my brother’s site inside its EXIF data. I liked this idea as I originally thought I would need another text file on disk, which described the photos. Tying data to an object by adding it to the object itself is also much more robust.
Yahoo! Mail bans apostrophes
I am a Yahoo! Mail Plus subscriber and recently noticed that my outbound e-mail rewrote my name as Philip O'Toole.
Seemingly it had been like this for weeks, but it only caught my attention when I sent an e-mail to my work account. Of course, if you’re a programmer it’s pretty obvious what is going on here.
Yellow Dog Linux 6.1 on the PS3
I got around to installing Yellow Dog 6.1 using a DVD of the full distro. The installation went OK, and the installer fired up in graphical mode. However it proceeded to create the swap partition almost immediately because of low-memory concerns.
When it completed YDL was quite zippy – a much, much better experience than I got from FC12. I even had audio.
I may actually use this – it depends if I can get particular media players running on it.
Fedora 12 on the PS3
In between bouts of Wipeout HD, I net-installed english-language 64-bit PowerPC Fedora Core 12 on my 80GB PS3.
Installation with PetitBoot didn’t present any problems, though audio didn’t seem to work. However FC12 is quite slow on my PS3, so I ain’t going to use it – it seems it’s paging to disk a lot.