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Handling Missing Data
I have an old Perl project that goes out to a Government web site, ftp’s some files, massages them in various ways, and spits out some output. Over time, the project grew, and now does more than it...
View ArticleCron Isn’t Working?
Let’s just get this out of the way first: when someone says cron is not working, it almost always is, and they have just misunderstood something basic. Usually that’s not understanding the environment...
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Maintenance Tools for Mac OS X
There are a number of Mac OS maintenance applications that promise to help you with various tasks. We’ll take a quick look at a few of them here. Onyx Onyx is free software. It’s the only one of this...
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GoboLinux – A Breath of Fresh Air?
My very first reaction to GoboLinux was negative. The underlying idea of taming the Unix/Linux file system hierarchy with symbolic links isn’t new: heck, SCO did that way back with their 3.2v4.0...
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Review: Google Comments Beta
While browsing Google Labs, I noticed new Firefox extensions. Well, not all that new: I guess it’s been a while since I looked in here because Blogger Web Comments is a year old, but I never noticed it...
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Invalidating the Linux Buffer Cache
When you write data, it doesn’t necessarily get written to disk right then. The kernel maintains caches of many things, and disk data is something where a lot of work is done to keep everything fast...
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Background Tasks (Why?)
A comp.unix.shell newsgroup post asked a neophyte question about how to run a script in the background. The terse answer was, of course, script & While perfectly correct, that leaves out so much. I...
View ArticleGiving in to Temptation
This analysis was conceived when the coauthors discovered we’d each been independently seriously tempted to buy a Mac Mini, and realized what that temptation implied. Eric Steven Raymond and Rob...
View ArticleHardware Routers vs. Kerio Winroute Firewall
I had a call from a customer who already uses Kerio Mailserver. He had downloaded a demo of Kerio WinRoute Firewall and said he had a few questions. The first was a small technical issue that he had...
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Review: Wicked Cool Perl Scripts
Order (or just read more about) Wicked Cool Perl Scripts from Amazon.com Bah, humbug. Well, maybe not that bad. Actually, not “bad” at all: I have no real complaints about this book, but I didn’t like...
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