isaacs

# Hello, and welcome to makefile basics.
#
# You will learn why `make` is so great, and why, despite its "weird" syntax,
# it is actually a highly expressive, efficient, and powerful way to build
# programs.
#
# Once you're done here, go to
# http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html
# to learn SOOOO much more.

arvearve

I have marked with a * those which I think are absolutely essential
Items for each section are sorted by oldest to newest. Come back soon for more!

BASH
* In bash, 'ctrl-r' searches your command history as you type
- Input from the commandline as if it were a file by replacing 
  'command < file.in' with 'command <<< "some input text"'
- '^' is a sed-like operator to replace chars from last command 
  'ls docs; ^docs^web^' is equal to 'ls web'. The second argument can be empty.
* '!!:n' selects the nth argument of the last command, and '!$' the last arg

adaugherity

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# Create display override file to force Mac OS X to use RGB mode for Display
# see http://embdev.net/topic/284710

require 'base64'

data=`ioreg -l -d0 -w 0 -r -c AppleDisplay`

edids=data.scan(/IODisplayEDID.*?<([a-z0-9]+)>/i).flatten
vendorids=data.scan(/DisplayVendorID.*?([0-9]+)/i).flatten

electronut

################################################################################
# conway.py
#
# Author: electronut.in
# 
# Description:
#
# A simple Python/matplotlib implementation of Conway's Game of Life.
################################################################################

arvearve

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day?

by Yasha Berchenko-Kogan

A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?