System Administrator Appreciation Day – A special day, once a year, to acknowledge the worthiness and appreciation of the person occupying the role, especially as it is often this person who really keeps the wheels of your company turning… source.
Archive for July, 2005
System Administrator Appreciation Day
Friday, July 29th, 2005How to create unique temporary files
Sunday, July 10th, 2005Unix provides a couple of useful commands to create temporary file names or directories that can be used in your applications or shell scripts.
In Linux we have mktemp and tempfile. The simplest usage is as follows:
mktemp
/tmp/tmp.avSbCw
or…
tempfile
/tmp/file8W2jIZ
For more information take a look at man pages for both commands.
The birth of Unix
Sunday, July 10th, 2005In the 1960s AT&T Bell Labs, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and General Electric joined efforts to develop an experimental operating system called Multics. It took several years to develop Multics (1965 – 1968) but the result was not succesful and AT&T Bell Labs pulled out of the project in 1969.
Ken Thomson (from Bell Labs) could get an unused DEC PDP-7 machine where he ported his favorite Multics game (Space Travel). He developed the tools he had been using on Multics for the PDP-7, then he built a kernel, a file system, an editor and a shell using the B programming language.
According to Thompson:
It was the summer of '69. In fact, my wife went on vacation to my family's place in California.... I allocated a week each to the operating system, the shell, the editor, and the assembler, to reproduce itself, and during the month she was gone, it was totally rewritten in a form that looked like an operating system, with tools that were sort of known, you know, assembler, editor, and shell.... Yeh, essentially one person for a month.
After developing this basic environment, Dennis Ritchie and others joined and they started to enhance the basics: kernel, device drivers, file system. They included a command interpreter and other utilities. The project was called UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing System), a hack on Multics. The name was later changed to UNIX.
European Parliament said NO to software patents
Wednesday, July 6th, 2005From The Register…
The European Parliament has voted by a massive majority to reject the software patents directive, formally known as the Directive on the Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions. The vote to scrap the bill was passed by a margin of 648 votes to 14, with 18 abstentions.
You can read the entire article in The Register‘s website. More information from BBC News.
Say NO to software patents
Wednesday, July 6th, 2005As noepatents.eu.org says…
The Software Patents Directive, as approved by the European Council of Ministers, would codify US-style Software Patents in the European Union.
If that happens, software developers will no longer own what they write and can be sued for selling or distributing their own software.
If you don't inform your parliament, mega-corporations are doing the job for you: "The European Parliament is filled with lobbyists of Microsoft, Eicta, CompTIA and so on. There are 30 to 40 lobbyists permanently roaming the halls." (in Eweek, 21 June).
What can you do?
