My acquaintances know that I work in computers; my friends may know that I’m a Unix developer & sysadmin; my close friends might actually know that Unix is a computer operating system. What few if any of them know is why I use Unix, why I love using it and why I will not own a computing device without it. It boils down to the fact that I do not merely use computers; I wield them to some end — and there has not been an OS which has combined mainstream success and wieldability like Unix has.
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My acquaintances know that I work in computers; my friends may know that I’m a Unix developer & sysadmin; my close friends might actually know that Unix is a computer operating system. What few if any of them know is why I use Unix, why I love using it and why I will not own a computing device without it. It boils down to the fact that I do not merely use computers; I wield them to some end — and there has not been an OS which has combined mainstream success and wieldability like Unix has.
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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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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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Computers generally track time as the number of units of time (e.g. second or milliseconds) since some date (called the epoch); Unix counts the seconds since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 GMT. Well, at 23:31:30 on 13 February 2009 it will be 1,234,567,890 since the epoch.
Yeah, I’m just a bit of a geek …
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Computers generally track time as the number of units of time (e.g. second or milliseconds) since some date (called the epoch); Unix counts the seconds since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 GMT. Well, at 23:31:30 on 13 February 2009 it will be 1,234,567,890 since the epoch.
Yeah, I’m just a bit of a geek …
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I just found an article which details how Unix took a lot of difficult computer science stuff and made it easy for an end-user. Even in 1979, Unix had a lot of great capabilities. There are two problems: first, Unix hasn’t progressed very much since then; second, noöne else has even gotten this far (or at least, hasn’t gotten this far and succeeded). By now we should all be using Lisp machines; instead we’re all using technology that’s older than I am.
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I just found an article which details how Unix took a lot of difficult computer science stuff and made it easy for an end-user. Even in 1979, Unix had a lot of great capabilities. There are two problems: first, Unix hasn’t progressed very much since then; second, no-one else has even gotten this far (or at least, hasn’t gotten this far and succeeded). By now we should all be using Lisp machines; instead we’re all using technology that’s older than I am.
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Here’s a really nice quick and dirty introduction to Unix. Well worth your time, if you’re unfamiliar with it.
04 February 2018: updated text
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Here’s a really nice quick and dirty introduction to Unix. Well worth your time, if you’re unfamiliar with it.
04 February 2018: updated text
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We’ve a few Exchange admins at work this week for a special project (for those of you outside the technorati, Microsoft Exchange is a mail server). One of them dropped by my cube because he was interested in the software I use to relay mail (it, too, is a mail server — I’ve just configured it to pass on mail rather than holding onto it). So I gave him a quick overview of the commands I use to see how many messages are sitting in the queue, to count the number of probably spams, and to track the progress of a message through the system, from arrival, through processing and to departure to its final destination.
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We’ve a few Exchange admins at work this week for a special project (for those of you outside the technorati, Microsoft Exchange is a mail server). One of them dropped by my cube because he was interested in the software I use to relay mail (it, too, is a mail server — I’ve just configured it to pass on mail rather than holding onto it). So I gave him a quick overview of the commands I use to see how many messages are sitting in the queue, to count the number of probably spams, and to track the progress of a message through the system, from arrival, through processing and to departure to its final destination.
Read more →