It’s as though every other version control system I've ever used was created by people who were really into version control and Git was created by people who were really into hacking.
So you've decided to start a weblog and have a really clever idea for titling it based on a snippet of code you find particularly novel. Rad!
I can’t think of single piece (package?) of software I use, admire, and depend on more than GNU Coreutils. Maybe Firefox. Maybe OpenSSH. Some days rsync(1).
I didn’t know it was possible to build such nice closed-source programs.
Cheap branches make for new uses.
The Dilbert cartoon referenced in Neil Stephenson’s “In The Beginning was The Command Line”
MacOS X: How to turn textmode tools into first class applications. Mutt.app, Vim.app, Irssi.app, Top.app, etc.
How to get command line apps to respect the OS X network location. A neat little hack exploiting symlinks and $0.
Sometimes! Or, fork(2) is a very fast operation on legitimate operating systems. I didn’t realize it could be as fast as spawning a thread, though.
All manners of good stuff here.
Erik Engbrecht: “Java took cheap Unix processes and made them expensive. To compensate, it provided primitives for multithreading.”
Okay, I've read about five of these articles purporting to explain Git’s internal conceptual framework. This was the first that really made things click in any significant way.
Most of these are relevant to POSIX sh(1). This one gets me every time: echo <<EOF :)
More praise for GitHub from a small team of Django hackers that built a site in three hours on one night with a little help from git…
Make Firefox like Vim. No, like, insanely like Vim. Not just h,j,k,l mappings but everything. Looks like it’s been around for awhile. I'm not sure how I missed it.
I thought I had a few more months. Dammit. This is going to be a huge time-sink.
Uggghhh. I just spent 30 minutes hunting some arcane tcsh bug caused by coreutils dircolors. This is my revenge. I don’t even know I had any csh code running on this machine. It turns out that MacOS X’s /usr/bin/which is implemented in csh. Dumb.
This is why I love Unix.
“… adds a chroot(2) facility to sshd, controlled by a new sshd_config(5) option ‘ChrootDirectory’. This can be used to ‘jail’ users into a limited view of the filesystem, such as their home directory …”
Seriously interesting web based git browser and collaboration tool from the folks at Engine Yard. If anyone has a spare invite laying around, hook me up: rtomayko@gmail.com. I have a bunch of stuff sitting in bzr repos that I'd like to flip over to git.
I have a strange fetish for init systems (sysv, rc, launchd, etc). This is the first quick introduction to Ubuntu’s new init system (Upstart) I've seen. Nice examples of using the initctl command and writing job files.
Finally: “this manual is designed to be readable by someone with basic UNIX command-line skills, but no previous knowledge of git.”
There’s some good questions here. I've been running into a few of the same issues while experimenting with moving some of my bzr projects to git. Can one of the git pros out there have a look?
Runs on Linux and FreeBSD (with linproc mounted on /compat/linux/proc). I've always wondered why top(1) just kind of stopped being developed 10 years ago.
What PrinceXML is coded in, apparently. It’s like Prolog for large systems: declarative, strongly typed and type inferencing, module system, closures, currying, lambdas, and with a strong determinism system. Compiles down to C (as a portable assembler).
pv can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.
Oops: “At $1 billion … Sun paid a multiple of 10 times sales for MySQL today. Optimistically assuming a 20% profit margin, they are looking at a multiple of 50 times earnings for a return on investment of around 2% per year. Optimistically.”
Dennis Ritchie: “There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was called runcom for ‘run commands’, and the file began to be called ‘a runcom’. rc in Unix is a fossil from that usage.”
Steve does the Sun/MySQL aquisition Q&A and speculates on some interesting effects of the deal: “… YouTube sold for $1.6 billion, and consumed virtually no software. If that acquisition was to take place today, they would have been buying from Sun.”
Payware GUI shell thingy for MacOS. This is not a QuickSilver/Launchbar clone. It’s more like a magical bash interpreter that knows things about what’s happening in various Mac GUI applications (like Finder, Safari, etc).
“I am going to introduce you to bash’s vi editing mode and give out a detailed cheat sheet with the default keyboard mappings for this mode.”
“Other than the fact our child will be bright, text-based and sarcastic, we will otherwise be a normal family.”
I can never remember nmap args for some reason…
“Like with unix, cells are not ‘spawned’ – they are forked. All cells started out from your ovum which has forked itself many times since. Both halves of the fork() are identical to begin with, but they may from then on decide to do different things.”
“Installation is left as an exercise for the reader.”
“The goal of the GNU PDF project is to develop and provide a free, high-quality, complete and portable set of libraries and programs to manage the PDF file format, and associated technologies. ”
Manual page URL handler for Safari (e.g., “man:bash”, “man:sort” in URL box). References to other man pages are hyperlinked very nicely and the pages themselves are formatted quite nicely.
Brilliant!
Schwartz: “… we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform, and to the legal defense of free software innovators.”
“v1.8.0 represents nearly a year of development and testing to bring you a host of new features and improvements”
Looks like they're bringing the basic capabilities of readline up to the GUI level. Definitely interesting.
Vim add-in for viewing manpages, perldoc (both system and embedded), help, info, and php files. Maybe I'll finally be able to read all that GNU info doc I keep hearing about in the GNU coreutils man pages.
“To average users, the suggestion that they use the command line – or the shell, or the terminal, or whatever else you want to call it is only slightly less welcome than the suggestion that they go out and deliberately contract AIDS.” That’s a damn sham
Starting with absolutely no configuration file. This is why I've prefered lighttpd, because I can put together a separate config in about five minutes. httpd’s sprawling default config has always scared the crap out of me.
Some detail on rsync’s “rolling checksum” algorithm invented by Andrew Tridgell.
Very nice look at different methods (good and bad) for handling the command line in sh scripts.
I'm gonna give this a try for managing home directories now that I've convinced myself that version control is the wrong solution. I moved my homes from CVS to SVN a couple years ago and just tried going with bzr but VCS just isn’t right here.
“… cron’s pathological behavior has be petrified into the Unix standards. So if it isn’t broken, it isn’t cron.”
Pretty much what you thought but with great detail :)
The emacs(1) manpage from Bell Labs’s Plan 9.
Java becomes 100% more viable. So simple — why didn’t someone do this in the very beginning?
You had me at “SSH”.
About half of these will be well-known to the UNIX hacker but there’s a couple I've not seen elsewhere: lsbom, softwareupdate, screencapture, and lipo.
PARC’s Van Jacobson (traceroute(8), tcpdump(1)) on, well, everything that matters. Hands down best talk I've seen in years. I'm going to watch it again tomorrow.
Slashdot has become a horrible discussion forum for most topics. Disk theory and UNIX sysadmin type stuff is an exception, though. This story on ZFS might have the most informational comments I've seen in years.
What’s next? which(1)?
Michael Dell runs Ubuntu 7.04 on his personal laptop :)
Nice look at techniques for writing portable sh.
I haven’t had a chance to play yet but you can consider me on the ZFS bandwagon. It’s coming to FreeBSD 7.0, too. Oodalolly!
Seth is on the market. Hire him.
This is pretty darn close to my configuration but I used the mutt-devel port… Oh, and my ~/.procmailrc is pretty insane also :)
Recent presentation by Mr. Bram Moolenaar on how to be a bad-ass with Vim.
“It looks like you are trying to do a regular expression. Do you need some help with that?”
exec 3<> /dev/tcp/$HOST/80 What?! How cool is that.
Best idea ever. EVER!
“et see” :)
A complete look at the little used utilities for processing arguments in scripts.
Lots of stuff from Sun (ZFS, dtrace), Linuxulator translates Linux syscalls to BSD syscalls with not performance penalty, lots of performance enhancements to the network stack from the card up, and a new malloc.
Love it! This is less of an article and more of a minute by minute account of hacker seeing something he doesn’t understand and following the trail (man, code, calculus) to understanding.
Anyone who doesn’t know every single one of these probably hasn’t been developing for the web very long. Probably a useful crash course for newbies making their way over from FrontPage or ASP.net though.
“Essentially, this add Vi command functionality (albeit a small subset) to any (and all) text editors that use the Cocoa text system; e.g., Safari, TeXShop, XCode, etc.”
“The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.”
I've been using a fetchmail, procmail, and mutt setup on my Mac for a few months now in an attempt to get control over five different mailboxes and it’s working pretty well. If you've got some free time and lots of mail, consider playing around with one o
We moved from Windows / MS SQL Server to FreeBSD / PostgreSQL about 5 months ago and I've been nothing but completely happy with the transition. 8.2 is a pretty nice upgrade if you're doing data warehousing style stuff.
“The archetypal perversely awful algorithm”
Best UNIX productivity article I've read in a long while.
All you have to do is add a few lines to ~/ssh/config.
How to get rdiff-backup to not do that.
… and not just the usual suspects either.
Nice and compact…
How to not be fucked with…
Stallman on the EU software patent mess.
Worse is better.
Alright, it looks like I'm going to have to break down and learn how to package ports since none of this crap is working on Tiger.
Need to move away from history | grep -i
Introduction to being a complete bad-ass.
All on one page :)
yeah whatever… I've been trying to learn emacs for years.
Neal Stephenson on UNIX.
“KDE and GNOME have both gotten much better, but let’s get real. They're not even in the same ballpark.” — Ouch. True though…
What do Moore’s law and boiling oceans have in common? Sun’s Jeff Bonwick explains in three easy paragraphs. Really brilliant stuff.
Some really good info on various methods of dealing with synchronization between processes on *NIX based systems.
ctags/etags, strace, fuser, ps, time, nm, strings, od/xxd, file, objdump
“A guide to writing shell scripts for C/C++/Java and unix programmers”
A remote file editing package for Emacs. Uses ssh/scp.
Super useful tips on diving into Emacs.
A bunch of extremely useful notes on hacking emacs. (Ftrain.com)
Old and still very valid. What’s the best mix of Simplicity, Correctness, Consistency, and Completeness in software design? Describes MIT and “NewJersey” approaches.
Single page printable version available.
After using Emacs for three years, I think I finally need to learn how to use it. This has some good pointers.
This much sed will eat your brains!