Gunnar Ritter, maintainer of the commonly-used mailx program, explains why it’s not available on Windows. It’s an interesting tale of how the kluges deep within that semi-operating psuedo-system mean that even in 2010 design decisions made in the Seventies afflict Windows.
They afflict Unix too, of course, but generally our design mistakes were smarter than Windows’s design mistakes. Even in error we’re better.
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Here’s a nifty list of 100 interview questions for developers. I can’t say that I can answer them all, but I know most … and will learn the rest.
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You just can’t ask for a better headline than this. It looks like the London Stock Exchange, having lost a packet due to using Microsoft and Accenture technology, has decided to call the whole thing off. No word yet on what the replacement will be, although Linux is one option.
Not that Linux — or even Unix — is necessarily the best option. There are even better OSes out there, for example any mainframe OS.
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A fundamental principle of the Internet is that all hosts are peers, that is, there is nothing fundamentally different about your laptop or Time magazine’s web serving computers: each is a computer; each can run the same software and communicate in the same way; neither is privileged over the other.
Net neutrality is an important implication of this principle. Basically, all hosts on the Internet have the same access to resources as any other host.
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One of the truly wonderful things about programming in Common Lisp is that the system is complete interactive: the programmer can manipulate anything at run time, including the language itself. This is a really powerful technique — but how does one preserve the state of the system between reboots? And how does one get an image-based Lisp system to play nice with Linux’s system service model?
Well, John Wiegley published a great technique a few years ago which I’ve adapted for Tasting Notes.
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Apple uses H.264 for a lot of its trailers; unfortunately Fedora doesn’t come with it out of the box. Fortunately it turns out that ffmpeg (available from RPM Fusion) does support it, so all you need to do is run sudo yum install ffmpeg-libs gstreamer-ffmpeg and life is good.
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Last night I upgraded to Fedora 11. I have to say that I’m impressed! It’s the first Fedora upgrade in a long time which went in quickly and cleanly, without any problems that had me tearing my hair out, which was a problem with past releases (if I — a professional developer, sysadmin and geek — had trouble then you know that normal people did). Overall, Fedora 11 looks more like a ‘polishing’ release than a feature release: for the most part, things look & behave the same, but they do it better, with fewer bugs.
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As most of my readers know, my day job is as a Unix developer & system administrator for a large outsourcing company. ‘What’s Unix?’ the non-technical among you might ask. Well, basically it’s just about the greatest computer operating system to achieve widespread use (there have been better or more interesting ones, but they never really took off). It turns 40 this year. Kinda funny that I work on something almost nine years older than I am.
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Bob Martin proposes that software development teams model themselves after craft guilds, with a master programmer supervising journeymen programmers who supervise apprentices. Not only that, but computer science degrees would be replaced by apprenticeship in most cases. He demonstrates that such a team would be fairly inexpensive and could be highly productive. It’s an intriguing idea.
My big concern with eliminating college is simply that higher education expands the mind. But is it really necessary to spend $200,000 between the ages of 18 and 22 in order to expand one’s mind?
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The Guardian uses lots of free software to run their website. Recently, they discovered a bug, tracked it down, fixed it and submitted the patch to the developers. Were it proprietary software, they would have discovered it, but would have been unable to track it down or fix it, and the odds are that their vendor would not have considered it a high priority.
Free software rocks.
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Well, that title is a bit alarmist, but it’s true: Excel corrupts gene names and Riken identifiers in spreadsheets. I have to ask: if you’re doing anything important, why are you using Microsoft software to do it?
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The Apple Macintosh turns twenty-five today. I still remember how amazing it was when Dad brought one home, and how much cooler the Mac, and Mac software, and Mac people, were than any other computer of the time. We boys spent hour upon hour playing Deja Vu and Dark Castle, making pictures in SuperPaint, writing papers and so on.
I’m a Linux geek now, but I’ll always have a certain soft spot in my heart for the classic black-and-white all-in-one Macs.
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