Hello there and welcome to my blog!
I got the catonmat.net domain two years ago but couldn't get myself to setup blogging software and launch it. But today I sat down and did it, and it feels great.
How do you like the name? Cat-on-mat. I picked a name that has two short words that rhyme – cat-mat – and that is easy to remember. The result – cat-on-mat.
So why did I start this blog and what am I going to write here?
First of all let me quickly introduce myself.
My name is Peter and I really like computers and programming. I've never studied computer science but instead learned everything on my own by experimenting, tinkering, and trying things. I first got access to computers at age of 6 I instantly got hooked.
I like to explore Unix tools and make them do things they're not supposed to do. For example, I was recently learning Awk programming language and at the same time I was watching YouTube videos. I thought, wouldn't it be cool do make Awk download YouTube videos? A quick Google search for awk networking revealed that GNU version of Awk supports networking. After a couple of hours of tinkering I got Awk to download videos. Super neat! That's something I'll write about soon.
Edit: I just wrote about it! Here's the post – Downloading YouTube Videos with Gawk.
I also like to make programming cheat sheets. I have at least 30 on my desk right now – CSS cheat sheet, HTML cheat sheet, MySQL cheat sheet, Perl predefined variables cheat sheet, C and C++ operator precedence cheat sheet, and many others. About 15 of these I've created myself. I found that they help me speed up the learning process when I've a concise language reference a glance away. I'll publish my cheat sheets here as well.
Edit: Here's the first post about cheat sheets – Awk Cheat Sheet.
Other topics that I'll write about are various tutorials about how to get things done, reviews of Google tech talks and other video lectures, and computer trivia.
Edit:
- The first tutorial is up – How to convert Flash videos to other formats.
- First tech talk review is up – Bjarne Stroustrup's talk on C++ Standard.
- First computer trivia post is up – Why do hidden files in Unix begin with a dot?
I'll also be creating many interesting software projects and open sourcing them.
Edit:
- The first open-source project is up – Reddit Media.
- Now the second project is up – Digpicz
- And the third – PicURLs
Stay tuned for more awesomeness and see you soon!