Today, it is “The Day of the Programmer”. Since yesterday this has been made an official Russian holiday!
The day of programmer will be noted on September 13 (in 256- y the day of year), if year is bissextile - on September 12.
What is Programmers Day?
Programmer’s day is a whimsical “holiday” on the 256th day of the year celebrated mostly by computer programmers (reason: 256 = 2 to the power of 8 = the number of values representable in a byte of data).
Traditions include drinking, behaving silly, coding silly programs, mini computer games, playing with old computers, etc. Programmer’s day usually falls on September 13th; on leap years, it is September 12th.
Why the 256th Day of the year?
A byte can have 256 possible values, bytes are very important to programmers. Not because they are required for programs to work, but because the payroll system and Krispy Kreme doughnut cash registers require them.
Somehow I lost the original files of these, I’ve updated to use cheat sheets provided by Gary Woodfine.
Cheat sheets are handy, you ever get stuck you just look up at the wall where you have your cheat sheet right there providing you the answers you need! Moving to Ubuntu is a big step for alot of people, cheat sheets can make that so much easier! So in regards to that, here are two cheat sheets to make your life handier!
MoBlock is now deprecated. It’s official successor is PeerGuardian Linux (pgl). It is highly recommended to use pgl instead of MoBlock. You can found out more on the official wiki of the peerguardian project.
With all the recent activity in Ireland with the MPAA you can’t be too safe anymore, you no longer know if someone from the MPAA is lurking in your computer watching everything you download and just waiting for the perfect time to send you that court summons.
Program’s can be installed to prevent people like this getting access to your computer, on Windows you have PeerGuardian, for Linux you have MoBlock. We can’t really tell how effective these peer blocking tools are but in this day and age it’s better to have some security rather than no security!
I’m going to just focus a little more on the power of MoBlock though, which is rumoured to soon be the official PeerGuardian for windows.
Installation is a breeze if your using Ubuntu Jaunty, for other .deb users read here.
First open up a terminal and edit your sources.list you can do this by typing the following:
sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list
This opens “kate” for you using admin privilages. Add the following to the bottom of the file.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jre-phoenix/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/jre-phoenix/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
You will also have to enable the universe module, this should already be enabled just look for:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com jaunty main universe
Next you’ll want to add the gpkg key of the program. To make it trusted, do this by typing the following into a terminal
People say using linux is complicated. That just isn’t true anymore. Back when I first started using Ubuntu there was not much support for using the Eyetoy as a webcam. Now however using the eyetoy as a webcam is a walk in the park!
Just open up a terminal window and copy the following into it:
Today, it is “The Day of the Programmer”. Since yesterday this has been made an official Russian holiday!
