Correct: this is not rocket science, people. It's called a software depot (at least it is now - see The Practice of System and Network Administration by Limoncelli & Hogan, chapter 23).
How many directories in/usr does Mosfet want? One for X11, KDE, GNOME... TeX, StarOffice, Perl, GNU, "misc", etc?? How large a PATH will that create?
Actually, it's perfectly possible to use a separate directory for every single package - right down to GNU grep - if you:
symlink all the relevant subdirectories for every package into a common set that is referred to in the various PATHs;
manage those symlinks in some automated fashion.
For the latter, try GNU Stow or (my favourite) Graft (available via Freshmeat). These tools could even be easily run as part of a package management post-install procedure.
The depot approach has a number of advantages, not least of which the ease of upgrading package versions and maintaining different versions concurrently. And it's obvious what's installed and which files they provide.
The challenge is in encouraging the vendors to embrace such a model as an integral part of their releases; that would require some significant reworking.
Folks, this is wrong. P2P networks like Napster and Limewire are slowly bleeding the recording industry to death. Many, many years into the future, they may no longer be able to survive. And that's a cruel and immoral way to treat your fellow man.
So go fetch a gun and shoot as many record company executives as you can right this minute. (That's right, if you're a secretary at A&M, grab your firearm NOW and GO POSTAL.) It's simple, it's relatively painless - for you anyway - and it puts them out of their misery quickly and humanely. Folks, it's the kindest thing. Don't let them linger on.
Sounds like someone at IBM just read a load of Mark Burgess papers and found their next marketing angle. Interesting that one of their ideas for "autonomic" optimisation is for the system to clone and run several OS images...just like recent AS/400 models can do! These and other great ideas coming soon from an (IBM) mainframe near you! Presumably they'll be open sourcing all their mainframe technology so that the effort isn't impeded by "proprietary standards"?
Cynicism apart, it's a laudable initiative if it results in a large kick to existing research in these areas. SAGE are also turning their attention to the process of automating and scaling system administration tasks (see recent discussion on sysadmin "research" on sage-members list).
OTOH, I can think of a large part of the IT industry - those vendors with profitable integration services business units - who possibly won't be throwing their lot in with IBM on this one.
If you just want to download a predefined set of URLs, then Siege or any similar tool will do fine (heck, you could even hack something up in shell using wget or curl). However, if you want to process what you fetch and perhaps use the results to construct new URLs based on the contents (e.g. grabbing session IDs or other identifiers for use in subsequent GET or POST operations), the choice is more limited since very few "stress testers" are that intelligent or flexible. The E-Test suite by Empirix certainly allows that kind of manipulation if you have time to script it properly (for example, it is one of the few tools with built-in support for handling BroadVision sessions), but it is proprietary and (from what I've seen) mainly Windows-based.
There is also a free tool called Load (see Freshmeat, v2.0 just released), which is Java/XML/SOAP-based. It apparently allows you to script Java objects via XML. Haven't tried it, but it's worth a look.
It seems a little redundant to add further to the praise already showered on this book, but I would like to mention that, as a Sun and HA consultant for nearly three years, it was the one book I always had with me and it remains the one I still refer to the most after over seven years of working with Unix. Because you can't keep every obscure detail of syntax or awk usage in your head, but you can look it up very quickly.
Although it doesn't quite fulfill the function of a "cheat sheet", the Intro in my (first) edition contains a quick summary of the major commands, categorised by general function.
"Well, Mozilla 0.99995pre3beta9 is almost production quality..."
"Konqueror is my browser of choice." - "Bah, Konqueror crashes within five seconds every time I run it."
"You can't beat Netscape 4.7." - "I'd like to beat the authors with a stick though."
"What about Galeon? That works well." - "No it doesn't, it won't render pictures of white elephants."
"I use IE." - "Piss off."
Slashdot users could use some lessons in making objective, rounded assessments of software, or at least understand that usage patterns affect browser performance as much as the quality of the code per se. If you feel a particular browser is good or bad, you might at least consider how you use it and whether that affects your perception of it. For example, I find Netscape 4.7x extremely stable with JavaScript (& Java) disabled, but certain to crash on long pages with JS enabled. IE works fine for me at work, but again I disable most of the advanced options in favour of speed and less [Ff]lash. On the other hand, I am consistently disappointed by Mozilla releases, each of which is alleged by numerous early adopters to "rock" yet contain serious bugs in some pretty basic and necessary functionality (bookmark management, selective image loading, etc.). But maybe that's just because my web browsing preferences tend towards the minimal/luddite end and I don't have a fast machine.
Browser roundups are easy to knock off, enabling you to fill a page or two of your struggling news site with little effort and usually garnering a Slashdot link into the bargain. But a properly researched review - which, people, requires many weeks of indepth, varied testing and the application of a little science - has yet to be written.
I too have experienced hinge & screen problems with my Psion Series 3a. Although the software is good until 2040 (diary app, etc.), I feel anyone would be lucky for the hardware to last more than five years without trouble. When my Psion broke, I suddenly saw the one major advantage that a Palm had - no moving parts! Yes, the repair was expensive - and with Psion out of the market, the prospect of obtaining further repairs looks slim.
My biggest worry about any PDA now is not compatibility, keyboard, screen size or anything else so trivial - it's technological or corporate obsolescence. Once you're stuck with a bust PDA that can't be repaired or replaced, containing data in a format that nothing else will import, you'll wonder why you didn't use a filofax instead. I suppose at least Linux PDAs, once they reach consumer grade, are less likely to suffer from the latter issue.
On a positive note, the 3a is a lovely little machine with several features that Psion most unwisely abandoned or degraded in later models. I still haven't settled on a replacement; I hope I can before it gives up the ghost for good.
Around the time I was starting to look for a new job, an article entitled "Resume Writing" by Christopher M. Russo appeared in the July 2000 issue of;login: (the USENIX journal). It is written from a hiring manager's perspective and targeted specifically at resumes for sysadmins. I found the advice extremely useful in tightening my own CV and focusing on the requisite details; I highly recommend it to others.
If you are a USENIX member, you can read the article online. Alternatively, a quick search on Google found another, freely accessible copy here.
Basic advice: remember that your experience should illustrate exactly how you used the skills and technologies listed elsewhere in your resume. Don't just say "administered large server farm and deflected dumb luser queries"; say how you went about doing these things (e.g. wrote automated Perl scripts, installed project tracking s/w, etc.).
I believe Coda/Intermezzo support replication & distribution, don't they? Have a look at the Global FileSystem (GFS) too. (See Freshmeat for all these.)
The main problem with this stuff is that it may not be ready for production use yet.
Archie wasn't restricted to telnet, there was a rather nice X11 client called xarchie. I used to locate all public domain (the original quaint term for open source) software this way, back in '93.
I once wrote a ;lo ng, rambling review of RHL/SPARC and I've been using it since around 4.1. A few observations:
Solaris is better than Linux... on top end Sun Enterprise servers in enterprise environments, running something suitably heavy such as large Oracle databases. If you are fortunate enough to have a SPARC on your desktop (pros: hardware is rock solid, unlike cheap Intel shit; cons: 24 bit colour is rare and expensive), Linux is much nicer because the utility suite is so much richer. It's amusing to see Sun finally latch on and start shipping GNU tools with Solaris 8 - a major boon for admins (unless they're the kind of zealots who must compile the latest version of everything immediately).
Linux, as has already been noted, is perfect for rejuvenating older Sun models whose hardware is likely to last for years to come but are incapable of running later Solaris releases.
Were it not for the disk failing, I would still be running RHL 5.2 on my SPARCclassic. It was a solid release, it did basic DNS and X11 fine, it was still supported for security fixes and it made a good workstation when my SO was using the PC (she's a KDE user - fortunately, it wasn't in 5.x). Red Hat 7 has now bloated up to the point where it is almost as useless as Solaris for the low end models.
Support: who wants it? Only companies need the assurance of a human being on the end of the telephone, and they are extremely unlikely to be running RHL for SPARC. The rest of us just need regular RPM updates. Anyone running RHL/SPARC ought to be capable of standing on their own two feet.
Buy a copy of "Blueprints for High Availability" by Evan Marcus & Hal Stern. Then buy failover software - that's right, buy some. With a support contract, so you can rely on it or have someone to yell at if it doesn't work. Homegrown stuff will let you down, unless you have specific expertise in this area; it's easy to script simple failovers using the volume manager techniques outlined here, but it's also easy to forget a lot of the important details. (To the guy who worried about distinguishing between a dead host and a dead cable: you need redundant monitoring links!)
Sun will insist that their consultants install their cluster software for you (otherwise they won't support it), which is where the main expense lies. OPS requires resilient, simultaneously accessible shared storage on every node and a certain amount of Oracle genius.
There are plenty of other failover solutions on the margins so look around. (Disclaimer: my company sells one, but there are many others. I do not speak for my employer. Disclaimer 2: you need more than just failover software for HA, see book mentioned above.)
If you really want free/open source, I believe some of the Linux solutions are portable.
Because it has built-in compression and is searchable, unlike PostScript.
Because, believe it or not, some people still don't have PostScript printers (or GhostScript) - maybe PCL if you're lucky.
Because readers are freely available for most platforms (although font display in Xpdf is necessarily limited), especially as Adobe have been smart enough to release the specs.
Because it's a decent enough hybrid of online and hard copy document formats (if you believe such a monster should exist at all - yes, I agree HTML and PostScript may be better in their respective roles, but sometimes you don't want the hassle of supplying multiple formats).
Because it's acceptable to Windows users, and helps steer them away from using Word as a distribution format.
OK, power's out, this is probably the biggest crisis you can face as a sysadmin or developer. Worse even than your net connection being down: you can't even browse the web cache.
First of all, you need a standby: a magazine or even better, a stash of back issues, can wile away hours. And since you "can't do anything without the PC", it needn't be computing-related. In severe circumstances, you may have to resort to opening all those free trade rags that have been building up on your desk for the last year.
It is essential to track the duration of the outage, find the cause and get an estimate of how long it will take to fix ASAP. For example, if there's a bulldozer outside your window with a large bundle of cables in its jaws, flailing around showering sparks everywhere while the driver lies slumped uselessly over the controls slowly turning black, you can probably go home early.
If that's not the case, have a quick wander around the building and make the most of this opportunity. Electronic door locks might be affected, allowing you into places you shouldn't normally be, like the machine room: no one's going to miss the odd server or router if they can't even tell it's up. And the stationary cupboard could be yours for the taking. Loss of lighting is a bonus, providing good cover for: redistribution of office furniture; "failover" to nearest watering hole; sex. But since you work in IT, you're unlikely to get much of the latter.
If you don't like the place you work, or your business urgently requires a substantial insurance claim to bolster profits, remember that careless use of candles and other naked flames often leads to major conflagrations.
One final tip: remember that when the power is out, the phones are often still working. Use this opportunity to establish the precise extent of the outage, by ringing friends who are progressively further away. People will be reassured to know that the outage has not affected distant continents.
Lots of people seem to be recommending the last book they read, whether it was about the Internet or Unix...
Harvey Deitel's "Introduction to Operating Systems" is used for many college courses (including the one I took). It may be a bit out of date now, and of course it's more about the design than the history, but you can piece together the history from the content. It is fairly agnostic and covers everything from MacOS to MVS.
Tannenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" is also quite readable from what I recall.
Books describing general OS history are harder to find. ESR's jargon file (aka "The New Hacker's Dictionary") has some interesting nuggets though.
Oh dear, language wars. You have pretty much summed up the view I was trying to express (rather than the ones you have inaccurately inferred):
> Almost nobody writes Ada for fun.
My point: if you enjoy programming, you'll probably find Ada extremely tiresome. Of course you can write great C and bad Ada. But I suspect many who program for kicks would enjoy writing bad C more than good Ada (providing the rest of us don't have to use it, of course!).
I don't dispute the value of an engineering approach to software, if only it was a true approach rather than the unpragmatic dogma favoured by academia or the lip service paid by industry. I certainly don't dispute it when flying (although I get nervous in those A320s).
Instead of reporting this not-news, why not link to yesterday's press release from the HGP (kindly sent to me by a friend who works on the project). They are moving from a "draft" sequence towards the finished version, having completed 85% of it.
Yes, Ada is very productive if you're a university wishing to churn out carefully indoctrinated "software engineers"...
When I did my degree, Ada was used as a teaching language for almost the entire three years (with some diversions: ML as an example of a functional language, M68k assembler to deter us from writing in assembler;-). And yes, it did seem verbose, cumbersome and dull - which was also what individuals became if they programmed in it for too long. It didn't help that the lecturers never saw fit to teach us about the compiler environment - make tools and so forth - that might have made development less painful. I don't know about GNAT, but the Ada compiler that used Ada syntax in its command language sucked hard.
Anyway, the only programming projects I really enjoyed were the C ones in the third year (C was covered almost in passing within a module seemingly provided as a concession to those in the department who claimed that graduates needed C skills for the job market). I think it's true that Ada partly suffered from a lack of bindings to other libraries, which made C projects look more interesting and versatile. (We used an Ada curses binding once...yuk.)
Since then, my old CS dept has swapped to Java as a teaching language, which has the significant advantage of being more vocational. I doubt many will miss Ada.
As someone who has written 100 page+ user manuals for a software product, I am often frustrated that I have to repeat so much of what I consider to be "core" Unix knowledge or standard system procedures. The product in question sometimes requires knowledge of networking, SCSI and disk management, application control, etc. There is pressure from marketing to document every step of installation and configuration in complete detail as "hand-holding" for customers, yet when I cover some of the required procedures I:
repeat information available elsewhere, typically in the OS vendor's documentation;
duplicate similar information for each supported platform;
risk the manual becoming outdated or incorrect when those procedures change in future OS upgrades.
Isn't it time we promoted reuseable documentation? With the ubiquity of hyperlinking, I should be able to create links (optionally "inlined"!) to external documents covering relevant procedures and background. Other writers should then be able to subset all or part of my document for their own work (say, if they were documenting add-on components).
Programmers are able to pull in object libraries and modules; wouldn't it be incredibly useful for technical writers to call on similar resources? I foresee a need for standards if this is ever to become feasible. Could the open source movement set these standards and shake up another area of software development?
Cheers, Ade_ /
Re:Banks -- love him or hate him.
on
Inversions
·
· Score: 1
> As for telling a good story, read "Espedair > Street", "The Crow Road", or "Complicity" > and try telling me he can't.
Alternatively, read "Whit" and watch him prove that sometimes he can't.
I loved "The Wasp Factory" and "The Crow Road", enjoyed "Walking on Glass", "Complicity" and "Espedair Street" (but have no urge to reread them), couldn't get into "The Bridge" (the mad Scots accent did it for me) and stopped reading "Canal Dreams" after the bit where they shoot the hostages, repulsed by the violence (but that's probably just me). Banks is a very inconsistent author. Be warned, people.
Before everyone goes ripping their homes apart, triggering a housing crisis for thousands of geeks ("I only pulled a few walls down and then the roof fell in!"), does anyone know if the various wireless LAN solutions are cheap and capable enough for this type of application yet? It sounds like the technology gets closer everyday; may be worth considering before going to a lot of trouble and expense.
Dead easy to do something minimal, requires proportionately more effort to wire every room decently. If you don't fancy channelling wires through your walls, get an electrician to run the Cat5 cable for you (be prepared to supply it yourself) and sink breakout boxes where you need them, then you can use a Krone tool to fit the front plates to the exposed wires. The most important advice would be to plan your cable runs and outlets carefully, following similar guidelines to those for electrics: think about furniture, location, requirement, etc. I put an outlet in the dining room and my SO has subsequently placed a bookcase over it (thanks, darling, remind me to wall your cat up sometime), necessitating a 4m UTP cable coiled behind it ready to plug in.
As an aside, a good DHCP config on your server will probably make you popular with geek friends bearing laptops.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
How many directories in
Actually, it's perfectly possible to use a separate directory for every single package - right down to GNU grep - if you:
For the latter, try GNU Stow or (my favourite) Graft (available via Freshmeat). These tools could even be easily run as part of a package management post-install procedure.
The depot approach has a number of advantages, not least of which the ease of upgrading package versions and maintaining different versions concurrently. And it's obvious what's installed and which files they provide.
The challenge is in encouraging the vendors to embrace such a model as an integral part of their releases; that would require some significant reworking.
Ade_
/
Folks, this is wrong. P2P networks like Napster and Limewire are slowly bleeding the recording industry to death. Many, many years into the future, they may no longer be able to survive. And that's a cruel and immoral way to treat your fellow man.
So go fetch a gun and shoot as many record company executives as you can right this minute. (That's right, if you're a secretary at A&M, grab your firearm NOW and GO POSTAL.) It's simple, it's relatively painless - for you anyway - and it puts them out of their misery quickly and humanely. Folks, it's the kindest thing. Don't let them linger on.
You know it makes sense.
Ade_
/
Sounds like someone at IBM just read a load of Mark Burgess papers and found their next marketing angle. Interesting that one of their ideas for "autonomic" optimisation is for the system to clone and run several OS images...just like recent AS/400 models can do! These and other great ideas coming soon from an (IBM) mainframe near you! Presumably they'll be open sourcing all their mainframe technology so that the effort isn't impeded by "proprietary standards"?
Cynicism apart, it's a laudable initiative if it results in a large kick to existing research in these areas. SAGE are also turning their attention to the process of automating and scaling system administration tasks (see recent discussion on sysadmin "research" on sage-members list).
OTOH, I can think of a large part of the IT industry - those vendors with profitable integration services business units - who possibly won't be throwing their lot in with IBM on this one.
Ade_
/
If you just want to download a predefined set of URLs, then Siege or any similar tool will do fine (heck, you could even hack something up in shell using wget or curl). However, if you want to process what you fetch and perhaps use the results to construct new URLs based on the contents (e.g. grabbing session IDs or other identifiers for use in subsequent GET or POST operations), the choice is more limited since very few "stress testers" are that intelligent or flexible. The E-Test suite by Empirix certainly allows that kind of manipulation if you have time to script it properly (for example, it is one of the few tools with built-in support for handling BroadVision sessions), but it is proprietary and (from what I've seen) mainly Windows-based.
There is also a free tool called Load (see Freshmeat, v2.0 just released), which is Java/XML/SOAP-based. It apparently allows you to script Java objects via XML. Haven't tried it, but it's worth a look.
Ade_
/
It seems a little redundant to add further to the praise already showered on this book, but I would like to mention that, as a Sun and HA consultant for nearly three years, it was the one book I always had with me and it remains the one I still refer to the most after over seven years of working with Unix. Because you can't keep every obscure detail of syntax or awk usage in your head, but you can look it up very quickly.
Although it doesn't quite fulfill the function of a "cheat sheet", the Intro in my (first) edition contains a quick summary of the major commands, categorised by general function.
Ade_
/
Anyone know what happened to this guy? The web site is still there, but is Geoff Cook still involved?
Ade_
/
"Konqueror is my browser of choice." - "Bah, Konqueror crashes within five seconds every time I run it."
"You can't beat Netscape 4.7." - "I'd like to beat the authors with a stick though."
"What about Galeon? That works well." - "No it doesn't, it won't render pictures of white elephants."
"I use IE." - "Piss off."
Slashdot users could use some lessons in making objective, rounded assessments of software, or at least understand that usage patterns affect browser performance as much as the quality of the code per se. If you feel a particular browser is good or bad, you might at least consider how you use it and whether that affects your perception of it. For example, I find Netscape 4.7x extremely stable with JavaScript (& Java) disabled, but certain to crash on long pages with JS enabled. IE works fine for me at work, but again I disable most of the advanced options in favour of speed and less [Ff]lash. On the other hand, I am consistently disappointed by Mozilla releases, each of which is alleged by numerous early adopters to "rock" yet contain serious bugs in some pretty basic and necessary functionality (bookmark management, selective image loading, etc.). But maybe that's just because my web browsing preferences tend towards the minimal/luddite end and I don't have a fast machine.
Browser roundups are easy to knock off, enabling you to fill a page or two of your struggling news site with little effort and usually garnering a Slashdot link into the bargain. But a properly researched review - which, people, requires many weeks of indepth, varied testing and the application of a little science - has yet to be written.
Yours grumpily on a Monday morning,
Ade_
/
Don't sort through 300 random Slashdot trolls. Join the System Administrators Guild and get their booklet on Hiring System Administrators. That should answer all your questions in one hit.
Ade_
/
I too have experienced hinge & screen problems with my Psion Series 3a. Although the software is good until 2040 (diary app, etc.), I feel anyone would be lucky for the hardware to last more than five years without trouble. When my Psion broke, I suddenly saw the one major advantage that a Palm had - no moving parts! Yes, the repair was expensive - and with Psion out of the market, the prospect of obtaining further repairs looks slim.
My biggest worry about any PDA now is not compatibility, keyboard, screen size or anything else so trivial - it's technological or corporate obsolescence. Once you're stuck with a bust PDA that can't be repaired or replaced, containing data in a format that nothing else will import, you'll wonder why you didn't use a filofax instead. I suppose at least Linux PDAs, once they reach consumer grade, are less likely to suffer from the latter issue.
On a positive note, the 3a is a lovely little machine with several features that Psion most unwisely abandoned or degraded in later models. I still haven't settled on a replacement; I hope I can before it gives up the ghost for good.
Ade_
/
Around the time I was starting to look for a new job, an article entitled "Resume Writing" by Christopher M. Russo appeared in the July 2000 issue of ;login: (the USENIX journal). It is written from a hiring manager's perspective and targeted specifically at resumes for sysadmins. I found the advice extremely useful in tightening my own CV and focusing on the requisite details; I highly recommend it to others.
If you are a USENIX member, you can read the article online. Alternatively, a quick search on Google found another, freely accessible copy here.
Basic advice: remember that your experience should illustrate exactly how you used the skills and technologies listed elsewhere in your resume. Don't just say "administered large server farm and deflected dumb luser queries"; say how you went about doing these things (e.g. wrote automated Perl scripts, installed project tracking s/w, etc.).
Good hunting,
Ade_
/
I believe Coda/Intermezzo support replication & distribution, don't they? Have a look at the Global FileSystem (GFS) too. (See Freshmeat for all these.)
The main problem with this stuff is that it may not be ready for production use yet.
Ade
Archie wasn't restricted to telnet, there was a rather nice X11 client called xarchie. I used to locate all public domain (the original quaint term for open source) software this way, back in '93.
There is an FTP search facility on Lycos.
Ade_
/
Ade_
/
Finger pointing? We love it! Remember: every support call you make reduces the vendor's profit on the support contract.
See under "Support" here.
Ade_
/
Buy a copy of "Blueprints for High Availability" by Evan Marcus & Hal Stern. Then buy failover software - that's right, buy some. With a support contract, so you can rely on it or have someone to yell at if it doesn't work. Homegrown stuff will let you down, unless you have specific expertise in this area; it's easy to script simple failovers using the volume manager techniques outlined here, but it's also easy to forget a lot of the important details. (To the guy who worried about distinguishing between a dead host and a dead cable: you need redundant monitoring links!)
Sun will insist that their consultants install their cluster software for you (otherwise they won't support it), which is where the main expense lies. OPS requires resilient, simultaneously accessible shared storage on every node and a certain amount of Oracle genius.
There are plenty of other failover solutions on the margins so look around. (Disclaimer: my company sells one, but there are many others. I do not speak for my employer. Disclaimer 2: you need more than just failover software for HA, see book mentioned above.)
If you really want free/open source, I believe some of the Linux solutions are portable.
Ade_
/
Ade_
/
OK, power's out, this is probably the biggest crisis you can face as a sysadmin or developer. Worse even than your net connection being down: you can't even browse the web cache.
First of all, you need a standby: a magazine or even better, a stash of back issues, can wile away hours. And since you "can't do anything without the PC", it needn't be computing-related. In severe circumstances, you may have to resort to opening all those free trade rags that have been building up on your desk for the last year.
It is essential to track the duration of the outage, find the cause and get an estimate of how long it will take to fix ASAP. For example, if there's a bulldozer outside your window with a large bundle of cables in its jaws, flailing around showering sparks everywhere while the driver lies slumped uselessly over the controls slowly turning black, you can probably go home early.
If that's not the case, have a quick wander around the building and make the most of this opportunity. Electronic door locks might be affected, allowing you into places you shouldn't normally be, like the machine room: no one's going to miss the odd server or router if they can't even tell it's up. And the stationary cupboard could be yours for the taking. Loss of lighting is a bonus, providing good cover for: redistribution of office furniture; "failover" to nearest watering hole; sex. But since you work in IT, you're unlikely to get much of the latter.
If you don't like the place you work, or your business urgently requires a substantial insurance claim to bolster profits, remember that careless use of candles and other naked flames often leads to major conflagrations.
One final tip: remember that when the power is out, the phones are often still working. Use this opportunity to establish the precise extent of the outage, by ringing friends who are progressively further away. People will be reassured to know that the outage has not affected distant continents.
Ade_
/
Lots of people seem to be recommending the last book they read, whether it was about the Internet or Unix...
Harvey Deitel's "Introduction to Operating Systems" is used for many college courses (including the one I took). It may be a bit out of date now, and of course it's more about the design than the history, but you can piece together the history from the content. It is fairly agnostic and covers everything from MacOS to MVS.
Tannenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" is also quite readable from what I recall.
Books describing general OS history are harder to find. ESR's jargon file (aka "The New Hacker's Dictionary") has some interesting nuggets though.
Ade_
/
Oh dear, language wars. You have pretty much summed up the view I was trying to express (rather than the ones you have inaccurately inferred):
> Almost nobody writes Ada for fun.
My point: if you enjoy programming, you'll probably find Ada extremely tiresome. Of course you can write great C and bad Ada. But I suspect many who program for kicks would enjoy writing bad C more than good Ada (providing the rest of us don't have to use it, of course!).
I don't dispute the value of an engineering approach to software, if only it was a true approach rather than the unpragmatic dogma favoured by academia or the lip service paid by industry. I certainly don't dispute it when flying (although I get nervous in those A320s).
Ade_
/
Instead of reporting this not-news, why not link to yesterday's press release from the HGP (kindly sent to me by a friend who works on the project). They are moving from a "draft" sequence towards the finished version, having completed 85% of it.
Ade_
/
Yes, Ada is very productive if you're a university wishing to churn out carefully indoctrinated "software engineers"...
;-). And yes, it did seem verbose, cumbersome and dull - which was also what individuals became if they programmed in it for too long. It didn't help that the lecturers never saw fit to teach us about the compiler environment - make tools and so forth - that might have made development less painful. I don't know about GNAT, but the Ada compiler that used Ada syntax in its command language sucked hard.
When I did my degree, Ada was used as a teaching language for almost the entire three years (with some diversions: ML as an example of a functional language, M68k assembler to deter us from writing in assembler
Anyway, the only programming projects I really enjoyed were the C ones in the third year (C was covered almost in passing within a module seemingly provided as a concession to those in the department who claimed that graduates needed C skills for the job market). I think it's true that Ada partly suffered from a lack of bindings to other libraries, which made C projects look more interesting and versatile. (We used an Ada curses binding once...yuk.)
Since then, my old CS dept has swapped to Java as a teaching language, which has the significant advantage of being more vocational. I doubt many will miss Ada.
Ade_
/
As someone who has written 100 page+ user manuals for a software product, I am often frustrated that I have to repeat so much of what I consider to be "core" Unix knowledge or standard system procedures. The product in question sometimes requires knowledge of networking, SCSI and disk management, application control, etc. There is pressure from marketing to document every step of installation and configuration in complete detail as "hand-holding" for customers, yet when I cover some of the required procedures I:
Isn't it time we promoted reuseable documentation? With the ubiquity of hyperlinking, I should be able to create links (optionally "inlined"!) to external documents covering relevant procedures and background. Other writers should then be able to subset all or part of my document for their own work (say, if they were documenting add-on components).
Programmers are able to pull in object libraries and modules; wouldn't it be incredibly useful for technical writers to call on similar resources? I foresee a need for standards if this is ever to become feasible. Could the open source movement set these standards and shake up another area of software development?
Cheers,
Ade_
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> As for telling a good story, read "Espedair
> Street", "The Crow Road", or "Complicity"
> and try telling me he can't.
Alternatively, read "Whit" and watch him prove that sometimes he can't.
I loved "The Wasp Factory" and "The Crow Road", enjoyed "Walking on Glass", "Complicity" and "Espedair Street" (but have no urge to reread them), couldn't get into "The Bridge" (the mad Scots accent did it for me) and stopped reading "Canal Dreams" after the bit where they shoot the hostages, repulsed by the violence (but that's probably just me). Banks is a very inconsistent author. Be warned, people.
Ade_
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Before everyone goes ripping their homes apart, triggering a housing crisis for thousands of geeks ("I only pulled a few walls down and then the roof fell in!"), does anyone know if the various wireless LAN solutions are cheap and capable enough for this type of application yet? It sounds like the technology gets closer everyday; may be worth considering before going to a lot of trouble and expense.
Ade_
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Dead easy to do something minimal, requires proportionately more effort to wire every room decently. If you don't fancy channelling wires through your walls, get an electrician to run the Cat5 cable for you (be prepared to supply it yourself) and sink breakout boxes where you need them, then you can use a Krone tool to fit the front plates to the exposed wires. The most important advice would be to plan your cable runs and outlets carefully, following similar guidelines to those for electrics: think about furniture, location, requirement, etc. I put an outlet in the dining room and my SO has subsequently placed a bookcase over it (thanks, darling, remind me to wall your cat up sometime), necessitating a 4m UTP cable coiled behind it ready to plug in.
;-)
As an aside, a good DHCP config on your server will probably make you popular with geek friends bearing laptops.
Ade_
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