Category Archives: programming

Installing Python 2.7 on Windows

Posted on 2018-01-29 by jimbelton

Python is one of the easiest to learn programming languages. It supports developing on Linux, Mac, and Windows. To install Python on Windows, you must have your OS in developer mode. To install Python 2.7 on Windows: Browse to https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/ Click … Continue reading →

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Announcing the new Programming with Jim

Posted on 2016-07-10 by jimbelton

I started Jim’s Jumbler as a programming blog, but then started writing movie and book reviews, DIY articles, and, most recently, articles on religious and political philosophy. I’m sure the mixture is a bit strange for those following my movie … Continue reading →

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Where’s my Core Dump?

Posted on 2016-07-09 by jimbelton

In the old days, the most dreaded message on a Unix system was segmentation fault: core dumped. In the case where it was your program that dumped, you then had to fire up adb and pour over the registers and … Continue reading →

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Scrollbar Buttons and Why I Miss Windows 95

Posted on 2016-07-09 by jimbelton

If you want to scroll up a page at a time in a terminal window (something I want to do most of the time), Linux Mint’s UI developers have made this almost impossible to do. Search for a solution, and … Continue reading →

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C Programming: Naming Conventions

Posted on 2016-07-08 by jimbelton

Naming conventions are like most standards: the great thing about them is that there are so many to choose from. Most people agree that a project should have one and use it consistently, but there is little agreement on what … Continue reading →

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Writing Utilities in Python: fang

Posted on 2016-07-07 by jimbelton

While working at Salesforce, I hacked a nice little utility in perl called fang, which is short for “find and grep”. It had some nice features, and I’ve often wanted something like it that I could use at home and … Continue reading →

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Building cpython/Doc on Linux

Posted on 2016-07-04 by jimbelton

For all the gory details, check out the Python Developers Guide. Installing and Building the Doc Here’s the process I followed to be able to work on the CPython documentation on Linux debian/mint: See if mercurial is installed by running: … Continue reading →

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libtap Version 2 on github.com

Posted on 2016-06-26 by jimbelton

Unit test frameworks are dime-a-dozen. For C programmers, there are libraries like cmocha and cunit. When we first  developed the sxe project at Sophos, about 5 years ago, the choices were much more limited. Most of the alternatives, like cppunit, … Continue reading →

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Installing and Running Ansible on Linux

Posted on 2016-06-04 by jimbelton

Ansible is a tool for managing remote computers via secure shell (ssh). This quick how-to is based on the Ansible Installation page. Installation To install Ansible on Debian Mint: If you don’t have pip installed, run: sudo easy_install pip Run: … Continue reading →

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Creating an AWS Linux Web Service

Posted on 2016-06-02 by jimbelton

This how-to is loosely based on this Amazon Getting Started page. To create an AWS Linux web service: Create an AWS account. You need a credit card. Browse to http://aws.amazon.com/ Click Create an AWS Account Follow the bouncing ball… Create … Continue reading →

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