Programs matter more on programmers, than the language

A study in 2000 showed a very wide range of performance for different programmers, more so than the language used. C/C++ tended to be fastest, but not by much. C/C++ and Java had a wide range of variability -- a programmer's skill was more important here. With Perl, for some reason, skill didn't matter as much.

Never mind the language, the programmer is what matters | Psychology of Programming

Ultimate Quality Development System

Our friends at Divmod have come up with an extremely clear method of rapidly delivering high quality software. The basic idea is you write a bug report, create a code branch, then check in the branch with a "review" tag. When someone reviews and okays your code, you merge into the trunk. This method has lots of benefits, including taking the drama out of peer review, and making it very easy to safely test on multiple platforms.

http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/UltimateQualityDevelopmentSystem

(via Twisted)

Using a HDTV as a Monitor

I sit across the room from my 46" TV and use a wireless keyboard. It's great! Alas, some Gnome and other Linuxy programs get confused by the TV's size and dimensions, so they display HUGE FONTS. On some programs, but not others. The last straw was when Emacs23 came out and I couldn't use it. But, now, it's all fixed!

Here's the magic jibberish from /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
       Identifier      "Samsung" # LNA650

# from Samsung manual, for 1920x1080p:
        HorizSync    67.500
        VertRefresh  60.000
# http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Specifying_DPI_for_NVIDIA_Cards
 Option    "UseEdidDpi"  "FALSE"
        Option "DPI" "100x100"
EndSection

This stanza gives you the old-school behavior so you can quickly test the X configuration. Hit Control-Alt-Backspace to restart the X server:

Section "ServerFlags"
# re-enable Control-Alt-Backspace to restart X server:
       Option          "DontZap"               "false"
EndSection

Thanks, Aun! http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1181631

EDIT: added "UseEdidDpi" line, to turn off the buggy DPI sensing, and use DPI=100 instead.