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Showing posts from October, 2008

Linux Programmer’s Manual on Ubuntu

I typed man sscanf on my Ubuntu 8.04.1 system at home and was shocked to see this reply: No manual entry for sscanf Never had a UNIX or UNIX-like system ever left me out in the cold like this without help. Fortunately, I found where to get the manpages . Just sudo aptitude install manpages-dev and everything is all better. Phew.

Stack Overflow: Pretty Impressive

Every now and then I check up on what Joel has to say, and I recently discovered that this Stack Overflow website is now up and running. I tested it out this evening by asking a simple little C++ question that I was feeling too lazy to look up. The first nice thing was that I didn't have to register. After I typed my question, I only had to type in a username and email address and it just posted my question without bothering me further. Nice. Then I waited a couple minutes and hit "reload" on the page and lo and behold, three answers had already appeared. Within 5 minutes I had 4 answers. None were quite what I was looking for (not really fair that I kind of already knew the answer and was fishing at this point), so I edited my question, started typing this blog post, and then hit "reload" again and saw another answer trying harder to fit my criteria. Fast results. I'm impressed.