For what it’s worth, here’s a picture of Ubuntu Linux running under VMWare Fusion on my new Macbook Pro. You can’t really see the lighted keyboard very well because the backlight is white.

Linux on Mac

Obviously this makes it very easy when developing software since I can test it on any necessary operating system. An advantage of using VMWare for the virtual machine is that VMWare provides several dozen “pre-built” images that I can download and install, giving me access to components I wouldn’t normally be able to have.

Plus, I can now play games in Windows without having a separate machine and I don’t have to mess with Fink or DarwinPorts to have Linux programs running under OS X.

Found via Slashdot, Frank Wiles writes in his blog about why hiring the top programmers results in a better product and ultimately at a cheaper cost, contrary to popular thinking. His reasons are similar to what I’ve been thinking.

If you’ve ever read The Mythical Man Month, then many of his thoughts will sound familiar. A single expert programmer is equivalent to several average programmers. Therefore hiring a few experts yields numerous returns, such as: > more <

I read a blog post from Paul Graham a while ago and it’s stuck with me since then. In it, he states that hiring programmers proficient in “esoteric” languages means you’ll most likely end up with a better caliber of programmer.

The reason is that people who learn a non-standard language are learning because they like to program and the standard languages aren’t necessarily the best ones available. These people go out of their way to learn a new language for personal enjoyment, not because they have to know it to get a job. Graham calls it the “Python Paradox”: > more <

Well, I figure it’s about time to harvest the power of the Internet and see what happens.

I plan on getting out of the Navy next June and so I’m starting to get my resume in order and see where to send it. Naturally I’m looking at Monster, et al. but for many large Internet job sites, it’s like looking for a job in the classified ads: you’re just one of several thousand resumes mass mailed to prospective employers. It’s even worse now in the digital age; it takes nothing to email a resume so a lot of people essentially spam employers in the hopes of “shotgunning a job”. > more <

I finally bought a USB wireless adapter for my laptop so I can now use the Internet at my leisure, in bed. I no longer have to struggle downstairs just to check my mail. Because of this, I’m going to try and get back into the “blogging rhythm” again. (In case you didn’t know, most search engine optimizers (SEO) recommend blog sites add new articles every few days to keep them “fresh” with search engines. The more frequent the activity, the hire the ranking, in general.)

So, with this article, I wanted to continue on with my last post about computer file systems. I was going to talk about some of the Linux file systems but decided it probably isn’t necessary right now. Even though I use Linux at home, most people still use Windows so they probably don’t care about what file systems Linux has available. Plus, most Linux users either already know about their file systems or know enough to find out more if they need to. > more <

Choosing the right file system for your computer can have a large impact on how well your computer works. I won’t claim I know everything about file systems, but I will share what I know, which should be enough to give you a basic idea of how these things work.

According to Wikipedia, a file system is “a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them.” Most people don’t think too much about the file system, if they think about it at all. > more <