Wednesday 14th May, 2008
I use awk (or rather gawk and nawk) a lot, and I was intrigued to find two resources on the internet very recently. This sort of information used to be hard to come by, so it was good to find it.
The first (and IMO the best) resource I found was an awk tutorial called Getting started with awk.
The second was an Awk, Nawk and Gawk cheat sheet.
Add to that my old favourite Handy one-liners for awk, which seems to have taken it's inspiration from the venerable and much-queried Handy one-liners for sed, and you have the four resources hinted at in the title. I hope it proves useful.
Friday 19th October, 2007
gcal is a remarkable console-based program.
- It can be used to print calendar information, much like
cal, but with much more flexibility.
- It can display holiday information for over 300 different countries and states.
- It can display astronomical information such as sunrise, sunset, the current phase of the moon and much more.
- It can also be used as a diary or personal reminder.
- It can print the current date and time. (No, really! :) )
- It can be used to display the start and stop of daylight saving.
I'll be providing examples of how to use gcal in all these ways. Bear in mind that this article just scratches the surface with regard to what gcal can actually be used for. You are limited by your imagination!
Monday 20th August, 2007
Old news, but interesting anyway. Tests by IT Week Labs had showed that Samba version was twice as fast as Windows 2000 Server when they tested it in 2002. The next year, Windows Server 2003 came out, and so did Samba 3, so they repeated the tests. This time Samba was 2.5 times faster.
In terms of scalability, the gains of upgrading to Samba 3 are even more striking. Last year we found that Samba could handle four times as many clients as Windows 2000 before performance began to drop off. This year we would need to upgrade our test network in order to identify the point where Samba performance begins to fall in earnest.
So, you can get something for free, which can handle many more clients, two and half times faster, or pay for something which can handle far fewer clients at a much slower rate. You would have thought it was a no-brainer, wouldn't you?
Friday 10th August, 2007
Groklaw has the news which we already really knew in the SCO vs Novell case:
The court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.
It's not quite over yet, but a big chunk of decisions which are due to be made depended on the outcome of this ruling. As Groklaw's PJ says:
That's Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". That's the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big picture is, SCO lost. Oh, and it owes Novell a lot of money from the Microsoft and Sun licenses.
That's good news. Well done, Novell.
Thursday 28th June, 2007
According to WatchMouse, a Dutch firm that monitors server performance, Linux-based websites perform better. The ZDNet article states that WatchMouse surveyed over 1500 European websites.
... although the websites it surveyed were more frequently based on Microsoft's IIS web server platform running Windows than on Apache running Linux, the latter option performed better in terms of both uptime and load time.
No surprise to me, really. The comparative complexity of the two systems will affect performance as well as security.
"Even though the companies in our study seem to prefer Windows over Linux, our research shows they would be better off using Linux/Apache-based websites," said WatchMouse's chief technology officer, Mark Pors.