Why I Switched Back from Arch to Ubuntu

While I've had a great deal of fun using Arch Linux I've decided to go back to Ubuntu. The biggest reason why? All the recent changes to Linux to create Ubuntu Karmic and the changes being proposed for Ubuntu Lucid. While what can be customize in Arch is fantastic and the wiki, tutorials and community are incredibly helpful, somethings are just too involved to build and too enticing to avoid. But in Ubuntu these things are getting integrated into the default distro so that anyone can use them.

Functional Programming Languages, Code Readability and Multi-core Processors

Two of my computer science courses this year have to do with learning functional programming languages. The other day (actually about a month ago, this post has taken me a while to write as I've got plenty of school work to do and that's taken precedence) one of my professors mentioned that first year computer science courses were now teaching Scheme instead of the Java I learned at the time. More and more I come across mentions of Functional Programming Languages (FPLs) and how they're the next big thing. But why? And what makes them so different from the Java and C++ and other imperative programming languages (IPLs) that I've learned?

Tutorials

I love writing tutorials. But lately I've been thinking. Sure, its great how a tutorial shows another person how to do some cool trick you've just figured out, but its not really teaching them how to do tricks of their own.