Go (sometimes referred as Golang) is the system programming language from Google which is my new interest these days. Some of my favourite points about Go so far:

1. It's a compiled language and I like compiled languages. To somebody who has used C/C++ and later Java for programming, this should come as no surprise.
2. It has fairly easy syntax and it's not a lot different from C which definitely helps to learn the language quickly.
3. It can be used like a scripting language.
4. It has a fairly large built-in package collection.
5. It has first class Linux support.

Here's what I did to get my workstation ready to code with Go:

Though Vim is my favourite command-line text editor, not all the default configurations suit my taste. Luckily, changing the default configurations of Vim editor on my Xubuntu 14.04 LTS (any Linux based OS for that matter) is fairly easy and so is persisting the changes. Here's what you need to do in order to persist the changed configurations for Vim editor (so that the changes do not disappear after you restart your Vim editor): Create a file with name .vimrc and save it in your home directory. So whatever configurations you write in that .vimrc file of yours, will be picked when you start your Vim editor (after modifying .vimrc, you may need to restart the Vim editor in order for the changes to take effect).

Recently I have been playing with Node.js and for every developer, getting the perfect IDE/Editor and setting up the workspace is very important. Here's how I got my set up ready:

I am using Xubuntu 14.04.3 LTS. So the steps that I am going to share will work in any of the Ubuntu flavours.

1. Installing Node.js: Node.js is already there in the default Ubuntu 14.04 repository and the version is 0.10.25. If you need more updated version, you have 2 ways. You can either download it from the official Node.js site, or you can follow this tutorial and add a third-party repository or use nvm to get it installed. In the first case, it will not be auto-updated though. However, I chose to use the default repository version as I didn't see the point in going through all these hassle unless I specifically want a feature that is only available in the newer versions.

Although I use both Firefox and Chrome on my Linux box, for playing any flash video (yes, I know flash is going to go away and I hate it too but for the time being, it's still here), sometimes Chrome is the only option as the Flash player plugin for Linux is very old and many websites do not support it already (Chrome separately packages it's own flash player which is not dependent directly upon your platform (which means it is available for Linux also) and it's version is regularly updated, if you didn't know already).

I own a Logitech c170 web-cam which has very good Linux support. I bought this web-cam almost 2 years ago and at that time, it worked like a charm on Ubuntu 12.04. I stopped using the web-cam over a year ago and I almost forgot about it. A few days ago, I had an interview on Skype and as my phone front camera does not work well with Skype, I needed to take this one from my Desktop. So I took the web-cam and plugged it in to my computer running Ubuntu 14.04 (yes, I upgraded), launched Cheese (comes pre-installed on Ubuntu 14.04) hoping everything would work just as before. But to my surprise, even though I could take photos using Cheese, I could not see the video stream. Here's what I did to solve the problem: