Apt-Pinning for Beginners

I'm off work this week and it's given me an opportunity to rebuild one of my servers. I decided to move from FreeBSD to Debian because I like the speed of grabbing binaries from apt vs. compiling ports. Also, there is much more Common Lisp support with Debian.

As part of the install, I wanted to grab some packages from Debian Unstable (namely Gallery 2). I'd done this on another server and didn't care what got upgraded to an instable status. However, I decided on the server I just rebuilt that I wanted to stay as stable as possible while getting the packages in Unstable. I found an article called Apt-Pinning for Beginners that gives you a simple way to control how apt chooses to get its packages. I followed the instructions and I think it's working.

Nifty! Those apt guys sure are cool.

Recent Inspirational Reading

I've been a GtD convert for about 9 months now (thanks, Mark!) and it's really made a big impact on the way I organize and keep track of all my "stuff". Prior to GtD I was a Covey follower and prior to that I used a system that I cobbled together in college based on different techniques. So, as you can see, I'm a long-time student of time management.

Over the weekend I read two good articles related to time management. The first was "Meet the life hackers" by Clive Thompson. This is a great article that talks about how some researches are trying to solve our information overloaded condition with software. (Has A.I. found another domain?)

I also read "Do It Now" by Steve Pavlina. This is an unbelievable tale of how Steve made it through college in 3 semesters. He also tells you how he did it and the keys to his success. I love the "Do It Now" section. I'm a procrastinator at heart and this section really spoke to me.

Finding the Best Programmer's Font || kuro5hin.org

Jon pointed me to a list of fonts that someone had rated on kur5shin.org. MMMmmm. Fonts. I think I may like ti92pluspc even better than Anonymous. Will play.

Anonymous Font

Thanks to a message on the LispWorks mailing list, I found a sweet monospaced font over the weekend. It's called Anonymous. (Mark Simonson has a bunch of other cool fonts that you might want to check out while you are there.) It's great for coding because it is monospaced, pretty, and 0s have lines through them so you can easily tell them apart. It reminds me of how I was supposed to write block characters in drafting. Of course, mine never looked this good.

Try Ruby - 15 minute tutorial

why the lucky stiff has created a short intruduction to Ruby called Try Ruby! It's quite ingenious. It's an interactive Ruby prompt coupled with a tutorial that follows you along burried in a web page. Very cool. He says he's going to add some content, so it's a site to watch.

via Lemonodor