How could I have missed this until now? Technology book publisher Packt Publishing offers a different free e-book every weekday.

I found out through Reddit, where Packt has its own subreddit in which it announces a new title every Monday through Friday.

The catch? You have to register with Packt to claim the e-books. It's just like registering for O'Reilly, except Packt gives out a ton of free books.

And each book is only available for a day. So you have to check the subreddit or Packt's Free Learning page every day.

And they're not the "sponsored" books that other publishers often hand out.

Instead, these Packt books are "real" tech books. They recently offered "Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition," by Loiane Groner, which I was happy to pay for a few days prior. (At least it was on sale).

But I've gotten a few books that really interest me over the past week. And you can manage them through your online account, downloading the formats you need.

Just like with O'Reilly (and with the Pragmatic bookshelf, Manning Publications and Leanpub), ordering through their websites instead of Amazon gets you a lot more flexibility (PDFs, epub, mobi) and often a better price. For me, it's worth it to get both the PDF and the Kindle version of the books, even if the indie publisher is charging a few bucks more than Amazon.

Some publishers, including PragProg and Manning, only sell their print books through Amazon. To get the ebooks, you have to go through them (and I am happy to do so).

Update: This issue went away in a normal install. I presume that the added firmware during installation took care of the WiFi issues.

Original entry begins here:

I was just saying how compatible my now-3-year-old HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop is with Linux at its advanced age. Everything in Fedora works with no tweaking, no modifications.

So I wanted to try Ubuntu 16.04 (with Unity even). First I used Unetbootin to put the ISO on a USB key. That didn't seem to work, though I had enough trouble getting the display to work that the problem could very well lie elsewhere.

So I used dd to put the ISO on the USB:

sudo dd if=/path/to/ISO of=/dev/sdb bs=8M

That worked. I booted into Ubuntu 16.04. Then I still had a blank screen. I tried to switch to a virtual terminal with ctrl-alt-F2, and eventually hit all the ctrl-alt-number combinations, after which ctrl-alt-F7 got me the graphical desktop.

That very well could have worked with my Unetbootin-created bootable USB stick.

Meanwhile, once I had Ubuntu running, I could connect to my older Netgear router running WEP but not to my newer Time Warner modem/router (I can't remember the brand or model) with WPA.

My laptop uses the Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 WiFi module, and that was where I looked first for ideas.

I found something pretty quickly.

In a terminal, enter this line:

 echo "options asus_nb_wmi wapf=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/asus.conf

After that, I was able to connect to my WPA-enabled router, and all was well.

I didn't think I needed to resort to this kind of filthy hack in 2016 and on a laptop that has been in the wild for three full years.

But I did.

I'm not sure what I think of Ubuntu 16.04 just yet. I'll need to do a Citrix test. Running the big Citrix-enabled application that I use for my day job is pretty good in Xfce but horrible in GNOME Shell in Fedora. If it is in any way better in Unity, that will carry a lot of weight.

While it calls itself out as old and out of date, I really like The Bastards Book of Ruby.

I recognize that Ruby is no longer the new hotness, but it's still so useful and, dare I say, user-friendly. For those reasons, I'd love to see updated versions of just about every book out there.

I'm using the old (as the hills) "Learning Ruby" by Michael Fitzgerald (2007, O'Reilly), The Pickaxe book ("Programming Ruby") from Ruby version 1.9.2 (2010/11, Pragmatic Programmers, though do I realize there is a 2013 edition).

The beginners books seem to be the oldest. At my level, everything seems to be working, so I will maybe complain a little less.

I do have a Rails book, "Rails Crash Course," by Anthony Lewis, that's much newer, but I'm not there quite yet. And there's always Michael Hartl's "The Ruby on Rails Tutorial", of which the more I see, the more I like.

I tend to learn things in programming when I have a problem to solve. This is just such a case.

I was working with a huge XML file, and I needed to trim elements out of it that begin with <generic tag> and end with </generic tag>, and include a random amount of text and other tags, across multiple lines, in between.

At first I tried using the Nokogiri gem, but it just wasn't happening. I was working on my Election Results script, and ... the election -- they hold it on a certain date, you know.

I would have to brute-force it. Like I always do.

My whole idea this cycle was to dump my giant sed hack from elections past and use mostly (if not all) Ruby to parse the XML I get from the state of California and provide the JSON output my fellow dev needed for the front end. (I also have a ton of fixed-width ASCII from Los Angeles County to deal with, as well as scraped HTML from San Bernardino County, but those are other tales for other times.)

With the state data, I had the XML-to-JSON conversion covered with Ruby's Crack gem. But I just couldn't pare down the XML to make the JSON a manageable size.

Read the rest of this post

A company called Prograils offers a great tutorial, Loops in Ruby - all possible approaches.

It looks like a good reference for when you're writing a Ruby program and need to figure out which kind of loop will work best in a particular situation.

I've been using Firefox version 47 for the past couple of days. And it's been working well. This isn't for my day job, where I beat the hell out of the browser, but for "research" (aka looking things up) while learning programming.

Nothing cost $ .

I should probably give it a try for my real work and see how it holds up.

Update: Firefox did better than I thought but not good enough.

Slow rendering in Google Maps was annoying.

It couldn't handle Tweetdeck at all. Nobody would (or should) argue that Tweetdeck is anything but a mess. It is built with unwieldy amounts of JavaScript and delivers messes (or masses) of data. Trying to run Tweetdeck in Firefox was a parade of "unresponsive script" pop-ups that had me bailing out for Chrome within the hour.

I want Firefox to be competitive. I'd rather have fewer eggs in Google's basket. But my web production workflow is just too many windows of pain.