I'm not saying I will make it through all 22 chapters of "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke, but enough people I respect have recommended the book that I'm doing my best to absorb what I can from it.

To that end, I am doing the exercises in the back of each chapter, and I plan on presenting my solutions here.

This entry also serves as a test of the Highlight.js JavaScript library, which I just added to this Ode site for syntax highlighting of code. I'm using the zenburn CSS.

Back to "Eloquent JavaScript." If you don't want any hints, don't go past the blog index. I will only start showing my code after the "read more" portion of each entry.

Before maybe a year ago, I'd never heard of Fizz Buzz, where you write a program that outputs the words Fizz, Buzz or Fizz Buzz depending on whether a number is divisible by 3, by 5 (and not 3) or by 5 and 3.

Fizz Buzz is supposedly used as a programming test in hiring. I was surprised when it was given as the second exercise in Chapter 2

Read the rest of this post

I recently received a too-expensive birthday present: a new laptop.

For the women in my life, seeing all those keys pop off was too much I guess.

The HP Pavilion g6-2210us is still kicking as it nears the 4-year mark. That's a modern record for me. My previous laptop, the Lenovo G555, died just after its second year of service. I still have a second replacement keyboard still on the way from China for the HP Pavilion.

Once I get this new laptop fully set up, at some point I'll pop a new hard drive into the old HP. The current drive has a lot of bad sectors. A lot. Then I'll run it as a full Linux system with no Windows partition.

So what about the new laptop?

It's an HP Envy 15-as133cl 15t with Intel Core i7, 1080p resolution, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning hard drive.

The case is all metal, which is quite an upgrade from my previous all-plastic laptops.

It has Windows 10. The first thing I did was install the Windows Subsystem for Linux so I could have Bash in the terminal and access to thousands of console-based applications from the Ubuntu archive.

Read the rest of this post