linux

After 12+ years, I built a workstation from scratch. Hardware has come such a long way, but that is a post unto itself. Having always worked with Ubuntu and other debian variants it was time to venture into a more lean distro. I picked Arch Linux, on the recommendation of several colleagues. It’s been fun. Pacman and Yaourt are great package managers, and the rolling release model ensures access to the bleeding edge all the time.

And sometimes, they barely hold your attention. However, the recent acquisition is the former. I got the mammoth of a book, over the weekend; it weighs a ton and I’ll be sleeping with it, clutched tight in my hands. If you already have the tomb by tanenbaum of similar name, the unix programming interface, you probably are not going to glean much value from this one (you can thank POSIX for maintaining a modicum of consistency over the years and some would vehemently contest that).

If you are not a UNIX user/not a geek, please turn away right now. Every year, I either chance upon something new, or remind myself of something interesting that I’ve forgotten. This is the latter case. On a *NIX shell, you can push a foreground process to background (obviously without terminating it): $ ./someprocess ... ... ... Ctrl-Z [1]+ Stopped ./someprocess $ bg [1]+ ./someprocess & To bring the process into foreground:

And the timing is perfect. Mr Dell, as it turns out (a little Douglassy, eh? Don’t get it, read “Salmon of Doubt”, the last book by Douglas Adams, pg 27), runs Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn on his home PC. Well, one of his PCs, he has four mamoths with 4GB RAM and a Quadro FX 3500 et al, costing well over $4000. Aparently, he also runs windows as well. Hmmm… living the high life.

Marius Oiaga of Softpedia News argues that Windows Vista is more secure than MAC OSX, on the grounds that there are more security patches for MACOSX in a 1 month period. Now, how naive is that?!! Developers at Microsoft are probably just catching their breaths after years of trying to get Windows Vista out of the “window” (excuse the pun). Now, why is Mac OSX more secure that Windows. Well, you never need to run as administrator (root, in unix speak) to get all applications to work efficiently.