Some time back, people here referred[1][2] to his posts as one of the interesting programming blogs they read.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120706 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3131380

But what will be the procedure when the computer is booted for the very first time(out of the factory, anew)?

It will run whatever is in the flash chip. That one is generally written to outside the system's control.

On modern PC mainboards with SPI flash (8 pins), there's often a set of pins (also 8) in close proximity to the flash chip - attach an external flasher to that, and you can write the flash while the PC is turned off.

The alternative would be to write the flash before it's put on the board, but which method is chosen is an implementation detail.

You're thinking about 10 steps ahead of this guy. He's just confused about the 'reset' vector being hit even when the computer is NOT explicitly reset, just when it's turned on for the first time, or powered on after being off.

The chips are programmed before they are put on the board.

From wikipedia:

That is to say, the reset vector is a pointer or address where the CPU should always begin as soon as it is able to execute instructions.

In other words, people who have lots of experience in this stuff gloss over the fact that "reset vector" doesn't mean reset at all, it actually means "whenever it's turned on, it jumps to this address and starts executing instructions".

That "reset vector doesn't mean 'reset at all'" was what I wasn't able to pick up. Now it makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Introduction of boards made me to move away from browsing Quora for long hours. Now, to get the best of Quora would be to read the weekly digest sent out in e-mail and the Forbes column where the best Quora answers are posted.

Reddit's subreddits are really a nice place to be. Not the funny/wtf/vidoes/politics etc, which will overwhelm you quite fast. There are some really useful subreddit which are of good quality, but because of their smaller sizes, are difficult to know about.

I feel these subreddits are worth a try: compsci (http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci) explainlikeiamfive (http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/) programming (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming) (There are a links to other subreddits of similar type in the sidebars of these reddits, which can be further explored).

One caveat is that lots of articles/links/posts from those places turn up here at HN as well. So there is factor of duplicates involved.

All any of your interests might have its own subreddit. If it exists and there isn't too much trash, those can be looked at.

Some more that people here could find interesting:

http://www.reddit.com/r/python+ruby+php+perl+javascript

http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev+web_design+browsers+operabrow...

http://www.reddit.com/r/android+androiddev+androidapps

Merged them together by groups and added even some I don't frequent (but related to the group). You can open them separately from right-hand menu to see their topics (and many more interesting links). And one obligatory: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups :)

My techy pseudoreddit url; http://www.reddit.com/r/technology+webdev+web_design+netsec+...

http://metareddit.com is also handy

The author speaks of writing some small scripts. I write some small scripts for my use for small tasks, if I come across any problem. Just in case, does anyone know a place(website,book etc.) where such small task scripts are collated so that anyone can use them like small assignments?

Advanced Bash Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper(http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/) has some good scripts which I have come across for some practice but it isn't ordered. Any others ?

Thanks for the suggestion. Another O'Reilly book to read!!

Man, I'd love something like this.

Not exactly what you're describing, but commandlinefu.com can be quite useful.

Thanks, will check it out.

As I couldn't find the date it was published, I deduced it must be written in 2001 from copyright at the bottom, as you pointed out. Also observing the rule everyone does here at HN while referring to old articles, I added the year. Even I have the same feeling about the modification of the article.

I am a newbie here who is following HN for the past 12 months or so. Since I hadn't seen this article in those months and after having read this article I was compelled strongly to submit to HN. I thought someone who is a newcomer here should also know this and that is the only reason for me to post this.

Godel,Escher,Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

Mangaluru,India