Re:Another book for Unix programmers
on
Think Unix
·
· Score: 1
More books with this perspective are needed.
This is why I always recommend the Frisch book from O'Reilly over the Nemeth Sysadmin book. It actually starts with files & processes and works its way up. I find that it gives a MUCH better grounding in WHY you do something a particular way as opposed to just explaining HOW you do it.
I have been an avid O'Reilly supporter since the beginning. I have so many first printing O'Reilly books, I can't count them all. I suffered through the O'Reilly binding-testing phase (and am quite pleased with the results). I swear by O'Reilly books. I recommend them to everyone who asks.
However, IMHO, the New Riders MySQL book is light years better than the O'Reilly book. Everyone in my group now owns the New Riders MySQL book, and all comments I've heard have been favorable... sometimes wildly so.
I also agree that the Linux Firewalls book is a good book. I have not read any other New Riders books, so I can not speak to them, but I will vouch for the quality of these two books.
You had me going for a while there. I actually thought you knew what you were talking about until you uttered this:
The *best* solution, IMO, would be to use that Millenium computer center in DC to monitor backbone traffic in realtime and give those people access to the network to shut down these things dynamically and in real time.
ummm...first, who's backbone are you suggesting the government monitor? (there is more than one backbone provider after all) And this wildly assumes that ALL of an ISPs traffic actually traverses their backbone. But let's play along anyway...
How about some quick math.
OC192 = 4,478,850 MB/hr
that's just ONE OC192! What? Don't believe in the magic of OC192 yet? ok.
OC48 = 1,119,600 MB/hr
Hey, that's better. Where are you going to put that data while you're analyzing it...and what are you going to analyze it with?
And what security professional in their right mind would ever choose to fight potential hacker activity by giving "someone else" the ability to make changes to their network???
IMHFO the *BEST* solution to the problem is to get system administrators to lock down their stupid boxes or get them off the net so they can't be used in one of these attacks, but then I probably don't understand the issues as well as you do.
Depends on the "we" you're talking about. We passed some of the crossroads a long time ago.
I've been on the net for almost 15 years, and it's WAY different now than it was then. Not long after I got on the net, usenet started taking off. I remember being able to read ALL of the messages in ALL of the newsgroups I cared about every day without kill files, threading or anything of the sort. Now, usenet is quickly becoming a repository for spam and illegal distribution of copyrighted material (mp3s, jpgs, warez, etc). Slashdot did a story not too long ago about whether usenet is dead yet.
I remember thinking how cool WAIS was, and how useless and redundant gopher was. I remember using beta versions of Mosaic, and thinking how useful it might be. I remember thinking how cool it was that there were more people on the net. I remember thinking how cool it was the first time I saw a URL in an ad.
I now spend a lot of time thinking how lame it is that there are more people on the net, and how cool it is to see an ad without a URL...
the signal to noise ratio of the net in general has gone down over time. for a while, it was worth a little more noise to get a little more signal, but we have long since past the point where the ratio is very tolerable. hopefully, someone will come out with some neat new technology to allow us to filter through the cruft better...until someone figures out how to abuse that too.
ok, since you say you use it all the time, I'll ask. I've been curious since I saw the feature (I miss the gnus mailing list), but not enough to actually set it up. Does it just randomly create a new group for each story? Do they go away when the story does? Do new posts show up in all of the active groups every time I hit 'g'? I thought I read that the new stories show up as zombies...doesn't that suck? what does gnus use for the group name?
The way I decide whether to read a story is the little text blurb (this is why I find the slashdot nightly mail of headlines to be vaguely useless). Is there some facility that lets me read these before going into a group?
I love gnus. Lars rocks! it's just that reading slashdot with a web browser is a no-brainer, and I'm not sure how well it maps to gnus.
convince me. (if you wish)
thanks, Michael
(Doh! I almost just pushed C-c C-c to post this;-)
Yeah, I have a book called Wilbur Winkle Has a Complaint, which is similar. a quick Google search turned up this Lazlo book review with a handful of links at the bottom to similar books. If you see the Wilbur Winkle book in a bookstore, stop and read the Calloway Golf letters...I cried.
just in case someone comes back to this thread, I'll post a followup here.
He wasn't kidding about the colors. I thought he meant a little bit messed up...NOT! they are almost inverse video, but the game played fine.
the biggest problem I had was running setup.exe files for the game installs. I didn't get ANY of them to work for any of the games I tried. I continually ran into missing dll problems with the setup utilities and with trying to directly run the other games off the CDs. oh well.
anyone tried WABI? what about that mac emulator for linux?
ok, so I know it's not real, but why not? My kids have lots of silly little games from Fisher-Price and whoever makes those Freddy Fish and Pajama Sam games, and these are blatently simple games. I can't imagine that it would take more than a few days to port the games. It strikes me that these games are probably 98% data with a tiny engine to play the sounds, and throw up the images.
It kind of irritates me that something as complicated as quake has been ported to linux, but something as simple as this kids software hasn't (especially when you consider that quake is only one game and shops like Fisher-Price probably use the same "engine" in all of their kids software).
no. it's at least both of us. I wonder if there are meanings to the colors, or if they're testing a feature which will allow user configurable slashdot colors?
I have over 800 CDs spanning 7-10 different genres. one hour of music couldn't possibly adequately represent my musical tastes. I also listen to about 5-10 hours of music every day. If I had to listen to one hour of EVEN my favorite songs five to ten times in a day, I'd probably go postal.
also, Mike Oldfield's _Amarok_ is a CD with one track on it...which is longer than one hour. I couldn't put that one track on your player.
But I did appreciate the reactions of the children who watched and enjoyed the movie. They didn't know of the alterations. They just knew they had been entertained.
Exactly. I held off watching the dub until about a month ago...I rented it from a video store down the street. My son (4.5yrs) watched it at LEAST twice a day every day for the entire week that we had it. he still quotes parts of the movie. the talkative cat was his favorite character.
was it different than the original? sure, a bit. did they RUIN it? I guess that depends on your perspective...
My personal fav is Strangeitude. Jurassic Shift is pretty cool too. Of course, I'll probably get flamed if I don't mention that Erpland is commonly considered their best album. Pungent Effulgent has some excellent tracks on it too.
um...how about some real prog rock bands (Crimson noted).
In no particular order:
Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill, Gong, Ozric Tentacles, Gentle Giant, Camel, Anekdoten, Anglagard, Il Berlione, Happy Family, Minimum Vital, PFM, Djam Karet, Present, Univers Zero, Magma, Can, Grobschnitt, Renaissance, and of course bands like Yes and Genesis who sold out big time.
Yeah, that was a little weak on Italian prog and Canterbury groups, but hey, follow up if it bugs you.
Yeah, Dia will rock when it's done. Wow! They've added a LOT of stuff since the last CVS snapshot I grabbed. Does anyone know when the next release will be?
While we're talking about non-MS productivity apps, I'd like to also mention that
...and now that I can view my karma points on my user page, it's even worse. I have this inexplicable urge to try to figure out how to boost my slashdot karma. Post more, meta-moderate more, etc.
No, really, I'm not addicted. I swear.
I have an alpha pager. Last weekend I got intimately familiar with the SNPP perl module. That's all I'm going to say...
Well, if you were really looking for a better sysadmin book, you should have gotten the Frisch book...and I'm not just saying that because this is an O'Reilly interview. It's what I tell everyone who asks me.
The first edition of the Nemeth book was great because it was better than the others that were available at the time. I haven't really looked at my Nemeth book since the first edition of the Frisch book came out. I never bought the second edition (the red one you say you picked up), but I've looked at it in a store.
I used the second edition of the Frisch book for my Systems Admin class. If I ever had to teach another Systems Admin class (which seems unlikely at this point) I would use it again.
IMHO, the Nemeth book is written for more cookie-cutter applied practical use and the Frisch book is written for people who actually want to understand how it all works.
there are other issues too. I've looked at this map and others at cybergeography before, and none of them seem particularly useful.
One of the primary problems (other than the one you mention) is that on cheswick's map, all "roads" are equal. there's no differentiation between the OC-48 "freeways" and the T-1 "dirt roads". (hmmm, can I do anything else here to perpetuate that assinine highway metaphor?)
so, all the map really shows is lots of connected points in different colors. even though it shows a valid representation of real data, it is not effective in conveying information about the net (unless you're trying to figure out which ISP has the most nodes).
yes. totally. If I remember correctly, Sun helped them do it back when their processors were so slow they had to resort to multi-processor machines to try to keep up with HP, IBM, and DEC. I remember the result being some photoshop results that showed pretty close to 1 to 1 scaling (i.e., on a 4 proc sparc it was virtually 4 times as fast).
It was many moons ago, and the dust in my brain may be clouding the facts a little, but rest assured that photoshop is well tuned for multiple processors.
I was poking around last weekend and found www.dvdpricesearch.com and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I wish I could find such a thing for books and CDs. (anyone know of one?)
basically, you build a list of things you want, and you click a button, and it compares prices at the major internet sites and tells you where you can get the set cheapest. it takes shipping into account for determining the cheapest site, and you can have it "break up" the order to get a better overall price by using multiple vendors. You can also have it exclude certain vendors (hint, hint).
IMHO this just totally rocks! I've found other sites that do single item comparisons, but this is the first site I've found that does multiple items at once (and takes shipping cost into account).
just think if you could do this at pricewatch...you could select all of the components you want in your system, and then have it figure out where to buy them.
Slashdot Mirror
More books with this perspective are needed.
This is why I always recommend the Frisch book from O'Reilly over the Nemeth Sysadmin book. It actually starts with files & processes and works its way up. I find that it gives a MUCH better grounding in WHY you do something a particular way as opposed to just explaining HOW you do it.
IMHO,
Michael
I have been an avid O'Reilly supporter since the beginning. I have so many first printing O'Reilly books, I can't count them all. I suffered through the O'Reilly binding-testing phase (and am quite pleased with the results). I swear by O'Reilly books. I recommend them to everyone who asks.
However, IMHO, the New Riders MySQL book is light years better than the O'Reilly book. Everyone in my group now owns the New Riders MySQL book, and all comments I've heard have been favorable... sometimes wildly so.
I also agree that the Linux Firewalls book is a good book. I have not read any other New Riders books, so I can not speak to them, but I will vouch for the quality of these two books.
You had me going for a while there. I actually thought you knew what you were talking about until you uttered this:
The *best* solution, IMO, would be to use that Millenium computer center in DC to monitor backbone traffic in realtime and give those people access to the network to shut down these things dynamically and in real time.
ummm...first, who's backbone are you suggesting the government monitor? (there is more than one backbone provider after all) And this wildly assumes that ALL of an ISPs traffic actually traverses their backbone. But let's play along anyway...
How about some quick math.
OC192 = 4,478,850 MB/hr
that's just ONE OC192! What? Don't believe in the magic of OC192 yet? ok.
OC48 = 1,119,600 MB/hr
Hey, that's better. Where are you going to put that data while you're analyzing it...and what are you going to analyze it with?
And what security professional in their right mind would ever choose to fight potential hacker activity by giving "someone else" the ability to make changes to their network???
IMHFO the *BEST* solution to the problem is to get system administrators to lock down their stupid boxes or get them off the net so they can't be used in one of these attacks, but then I probably don't understand the issues as well as you do.
Depends on the "we" you're talking about. We passed some of the crossroads a long time ago.
I've been on the net for almost 15 years, and it's WAY different now than it was then. Not long after I got on the net, usenet started taking off. I remember being able to read ALL of the messages in ALL of the newsgroups I cared about every day without kill files, threading or anything of the sort. Now, usenet is quickly becoming a repository for spam and illegal distribution of copyrighted material (mp3s, jpgs, warez, etc). Slashdot did a story not too long ago about whether usenet is dead yet.
I remember thinking how cool WAIS was, and how useless and redundant gopher was. I remember using beta versions of Mosaic, and thinking how useful it might be. I remember thinking how cool it was that there were more people on the net. I remember thinking how cool it was the first time I saw a URL in an ad.
I now spend a lot of time thinking how lame it is that there are more people on the net, and how cool it is to see an ad without a URL...
the signal to noise ratio of the net in general has gone down over time. for a while, it was worth a little more noise to get a little more signal, but we have long since past the point where the ratio is very tolerable. hopefully, someone will come out with some neat new technology to allow us to filter through the cruft better...until someone figures out how to abuse that too.
sigh,
Michael
ok, since you say you use it all the time, I'll ask. I've been curious since I saw the feature (I miss the gnus mailing list), but not enough to actually set it up. Does it just randomly create a new group for each story? Do they go away when the story does? Do new posts show up in all of the active groups every time I hit 'g'? I thought I read that the new stories show up as zombies...doesn't that suck? what does gnus use for the group name?
;-)
The way I decide whether to read a story is the little text blurb (this is why I find the slashdot nightly mail of headlines to be vaguely useless). Is there some facility that lets me read these before going into a group?
I love gnus. Lars rocks! it's just that reading slashdot with a web browser is a no-brainer, and I'm not sure how well it maps to gnus.
convince me. (if you wish)
thanks,
Michael
(Doh! I almost just pushed C-c C-c to post this
Yeah, I have a book called Wilbur Winkle Has a Complaint, which is similar. a quick Google search turned up this Lazlo book review with a handful of links at the bottom to similar books. If you see the Wilbur Winkle book in a bookstore, stop and read the Calloway Golf letters...I cried.
just in case someone comes back to this thread, I'll post a followup here.
He wasn't kidding about the colors. I thought he meant a little bit messed up...NOT! they are almost inverse video, but the game played fine.
the biggest problem I had was running setup.exe files for the game installs. I didn't get ANY of them to work for any of the games I tried. I continually ran into missing dll problems with the setup utilities and with trying to directly run the other games off the CDs. oh well.
anyone tried WABI? what about that mac emulator for linux?
thanks, I'll try this tonight.
ok, so I know it's not real, but why not? My kids have lots of silly little games from Fisher-Price and whoever makes those Freddy Fish and Pajama Sam games, and these are blatently simple games. I can't imagine that it would take more than a few days to port the games. It strikes me that these games are probably 98% data with a tiny engine to play the sounds, and throw up the images.
It kind of irritates me that something as complicated as quake has been ported to linux, but something as simple as this kids software hasn't (especially when you consider that quake is only one game and shops like Fisher-Price probably use the same "engine" in all of their kids software).
Is it just me and my version of Netscape?
no. it's at least both of us. I wonder if there are meanings to the colors, or if they're testing a feature which will allow user configurable slashdot colors?
I have over 800 CDs spanning 7-10 different genres. one hour of music couldn't possibly adequately represent my musical tastes. I also listen to about 5-10 hours of music every day. If I had to listen to one hour of EVEN my favorite songs five to ten times in a day, I'd probably go postal.
also, Mike Oldfield's _Amarok_ is a CD with one track on it...which is longer than one hour. I couldn't put that one track on your player.
40 bits is a completely insane size
40 bit encryption only serves one purpose any more...it leads people into falsely believing their data is secure.
But I did appreciate the reactions of the children who watched and enjoyed the movie. They didn't know of the alterations. They just knew they had been entertained.
Exactly. I held off watching the dub until about a month ago...I rented it from a video store down the street. My son (4.5yrs) watched it at LEAST twice a day every day for the entire week that we had it. he still quotes parts of the movie. the talkative cat was his favorite character.
was it different than the original? sure, a bit. did they RUIN it? I guess that depends on your perspective...
I agree. I thought they did a good job with Kiki...
whatever.
note that datebk3 is what ships on the visor...
I believe they licensed it from Pimlico.
My personal fav is Strangeitude.
Jurassic Shift is pretty cool too.
Of course, I'll probably get flamed if I don't mention that Erpland is commonly considered their best album.
Pungent Effulgent has some excellent tracks on it too.
um...how about some real prog rock bands (Crimson noted).
In no particular order:
Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill, Gong, Ozric Tentacles, Gentle Giant, Camel, Anekdoten, Anglagard, Il Berlione, Happy Family, Minimum Vital, PFM, Djam Karet, Present, Univers Zero, Magma, Can, Grobschnitt, Renaissance, and of course bands like Yes and Genesis who sold out big time.
Yeah, that was a little weak on Italian prog and Canterbury groups, but hey, follow up if it bugs you.
For more info check out progrock.net
Dude! you need to wake up and drink the coffee. It was a joke. go buy a sense of humor.
21" monitor...bah! How can you accept anything less than dual 24" displays? Come back when you have real needs. ;-)
Yeah, Dia will rock when it's done. Wow! They've added a LOT of stuff since the last CVS snapshot I grabbed. Does anyone know when the next release will be?
While we're talking about non-MS productivity apps, I'd like to also mention that
MagicPoint
rocks!
...and now that I can view my karma points on my user page, it's even worse. I have this inexplicable urge to try to figure out how to boost my slashdot karma. Post more, meta-moderate more, etc.
No, really, I'm not addicted. I swear.
I have an alpha pager. Last weekend I got intimately familiar with the SNPP perl module. That's all I'm going to say...
(somebody shoot me, please)
Well, if you were really looking for a better sysadmin book, you should have gotten the Frisch book...and I'm not just saying that because this is an O'Reilly interview. It's what I tell everyone who asks me.
The first edition of the Nemeth book was great because it was better than the others that were available at the time. I haven't really looked at my Nemeth book since the first edition of the Frisch book came out. I never bought the second edition (the red one you say you picked up), but I've looked at it in a store.
I used the second edition of the Frisch book for my Systems Admin class. If I ever had to teach another Systems Admin class (which seems unlikely at this point) I would use it again.
IMHO, the Nemeth book is written for more cookie-cutter applied practical use and the Frisch book is written for people who actually want to understand how it all works.
there are other issues too. I've looked at this map and others at cybergeography before, and none of them seem particularly useful.
One of the primary problems (other than the one you mention) is that on cheswick's map, all "roads" are equal. there's no differentiation between the OC-48 "freeways" and the T-1 "dirt roads". (hmmm, can I do anything else here to perpetuate that assinine highway metaphor?)
so, all the map really shows is lots of connected points in different colors. even though it shows a valid representation of real data, it is not effective in conveying information about the net (unless you're trying to figure out which ISP has the most nodes).
yes. totally. If I remember correctly, Sun helped them do it back when their processors were so slow they had to resort to multi-processor machines to try to keep up with HP, IBM, and DEC. I remember the result being some photoshop results that showed pretty close to 1 to 1 scaling (i.e., on a 4 proc sparc it was virtually 4 times as fast).
It was many moons ago, and the dust in my brain may be clouding the facts a little, but rest assured that photoshop is well tuned for multiple processors.
I was poking around last weekend and found www.dvdpricesearch.com and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I wish I could find such a thing for books and CDs. (anyone know of one?)
basically, you build a list of things you want, and you click a button, and it compares prices at the major internet sites and tells you where you can get the set cheapest. it takes shipping into account for determining the cheapest site, and you can have it "break up" the order to get a better overall price by using multiple vendors. You can also have it exclude certain vendors (hint, hint).
IMHO this just totally rocks! I've found other sites that do single item comparisons, but this is the first site I've found that does multiple items at once (and takes shipping cost into account).
just think if you could do this at pricewatch...you could select all of the components you want in your system, and then have it figure out where to buy them.