Fancy this Jam?

Hmm, some people say Google has the potential to be the new evil post M$. But you got to admit, there are some things which they do pretty well. Amongst that list, is the Google Code Jam. I participated in it once 3-4 years back. I would say it is kinda favored to those who are used to heavy API based C++, Java programming. More so for string manipulation based programming. For me, who has been mostly doing do-everything-yourself C language coding, it gets a bit (not very though and this is not to discourage C coders at all!) tough timewise. But nonetheless its a pretty interesting activity to participate in. Click here for this years details. Happy Code Jamming!

Coordinated debugging

I code in C mostly. I err and hence I debug too once in a while :). Have been using plain gdb for user-land program debugging for quite a while and it serves all my needs. Fast, from the command line, all the required bells and whistles (including readline) and I don't need no more.

And I even wonder how people use bulky IDEs like eclipse just to debug their programs! But lately, I wanted to browse the source code automatically while debugging. The alt-tab combinations to switch from gdb back to my source files in vim was getting a bit too tardy for me. And I had actually started considering thinking about an IDE (yuck...). But no more, presenting gdbtui!

Its gdb itself, but with the added convenience of co-ordinated source code browsing from within the terminal window itself! I was definitely happy to discover this gdb add-on today! Here is a screenshot that someone posted on flickr for you guys too. Definitely worth a try!