Showing headlines posted by jayrfink

It is that time again, a look back at the site over the last year, where the site is going and where material is going. 2006 did not measure up to 2005 for the site, however, it seems nothing else really did either. The upside is most material on a whole is pretty good - if sparse.

Return values are not just important but as age has taught me - essential. Use return values to your advantage and wrangle them when you can. Breaking things out helps, but making sure you let everyone know that you did break out some code might be just as important.

I have been very busy recently and have not updated the site with anything interesting or new - ironically I have not really done anything interesting or new in the last month or so. I have been getting ready for this year's Ohio Linuxfest conference (see their website for details). This year I will attending as an Open Source vendor. Steve Dickinson and I will be at the NetBSD booth (table) with flyers and a small system with NetBSD installed on it. Pics and comments to follow of course.

Over the years I have spent as much spare time as I can to get better at writing. I consider myself an adequate writer, not good, but adequate. In the new age of Blogs, e-zines and whatever else is buzzworthy compliant I have tried to find tools specifically for the Unix(like) environment to help out - in other words - I avoid word processors. Suprisingly I recently came across some old Unix tools that run right from the prompt and will not mangle the original text. Diction and style are not grammar checkers but instead, grammar helpers

The subversion version control system is a (relatively) new source control system. The subversion book is very thorough, however, to get a quick repository up and running (even for just testing) have a read.

What is a kernel? A piece on defining a kernel from a very hueristic point of view. What does a kernel do and what does it have to deal with while it is doing ... exactly what it supposed to do-do?

Oft times creating modules is not necessary (or perhaps wanted) at a particular site. Copying and pasting the same code over and over can also become cumbersome. A simple middle ground is to create Perl shared libaries that use the requires method. Simple shared libraries can be setup so a Perl site administrator and/or system administrator does not have to solely manage the code.

My friends and I in the Open Source community trade geek bunker photos. What I would like is fellow Open Source folks who have interesting setups to either email me a picture or link of your particular setup and I will link to and/or post it on systhread.net. Call it a fun geek time hole.

Sometimes you have to get it done and if you do not have complete access to a system then you must find a way. How to do a sandbox even in the simplest terms can be overlooked but if there is time - it can be done.

I get a lot of grief for using so called old window managers. I get a lot of grief for writing shell scripts as close to posix as I can (especially from lame sysadmins). I get a lot of grief for writing utils in anythng but bash. Well, for most of you - I do not think my personal answer to why I use C, Perl or sh-posix should be posted here. How about a look at minimalism from a pragmatic and practical point of view.

While this story is about startups it is worth a read for FOSS folks. Much of it does not just pertain to startups but projects in general.

The last part of a small optimization series, part III takes a look at sample data from using compiler optimizations on several key pieces of system software. The results were somewhat suprising in many ways, especially the ratio of improvement even for relatively small test programs.

n part II of a small research project, the kernel has yet to be tuned (but not too much :) and a few ideas regarding how to test the optimized bits versus unoptimized bits. On a side note, I did manage to trash a few kernels during the process which made things exciting. In the next (and probably last) portion the tests themselves as well a few concluding thoughts (and hopefully not more questions...).

The first in a series of texts about optimization has been completed. In this first part the actual bits needed and goals are explained as well as some of the finer points of the steps involved. All said the first part has been very mechanical in nature. Just making sure everything would build, then adding the flag needed to perform a build of a given piece of software. The rest of the series - hopefully - will be much more engaging as the next steps are taken into this tiny study.

The service program revisted in C vs. Perl. A few things added and taken away, does it make sense to bother rewriting a program in another language? If you started using the first as a prototype - sure - but (as is the case this time) it is just a simple util - not really.

There is a utility called service that can be used to shortcut the path of init (or rc) scripts on several platforms. The service utility is written in Perl. As an exercise service is being rewritten in C. The command needs to be able to do very few operations. The version presented in this text will have room for improvement requiring some additional functions and operational changes.

In the first part of this series, the problem of determining what the path to rc scripts on a per platform basis was shown within the prototype version of a service utility. Part two of the series discusses some ways to auto-magically take care of that problem and the particular method used.

There is a program called service which can be used on multiple UNIX systems to control Operating System services. One of the problems faced in the design of the service utility was the path to where system startup scripts (or rc scripts) resided. This series examines how using sed can easily mitigate multi-platform scripting problems. The first part will look at how the utility program works.

Not a graphics guru but you would like to know a little bit about creating a nice background? Using the gimp in a few steps, a variety of nice backgrounds can be yours for your X desktop.

Kernel terminology gets tossed about quite a bit. One of the more common topics regarding operating system kernels is the overall design. In particular how the kernel is structured.