Last night I discovered likaholix.com and was able to get an account during their beta phase testing. You can see my likaholix page here, but I thought I’d take a few minutes to jot down some initial thoughts about it, because I do think it’s interesting. Likaholix makes it Mind Numbingly Easy™ to quickly “like”…
Marc Andreessen on Everything
Marc Andreessen was on Charlie Rose last night, and I missed it. A buddy told me about it, and I wanted to watch, but things just got in the way. So here it is. So, this is the very first time I’ve ever embedded video into a blog post. I couldn’t help myself. Why? I’ve…
The bash history command
Sometimes I run through the search terms people use within my site, or to get to my site, and I see some interesting stuff. Over the years, I’ve written perhaps hundreds of technical blog posts and articles at various sites and in magazines (and a book), but I have never once touched on the “history”…
10 Ways Newspapers Can Still Make Money
I was following some people who were talking in different forums, on twitter, and on blogs, about Walter Isaacson’s cover story in TIME magazine this month. I was pretty harsh in saying that these organizations basically deserve whatever they get, because they refuse to recognize that society has changed in ways that make their old…
Walter Isaacson: You’ve got it all wrong
I saw Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of TIME magazine, on The Daily Show last night. He wrote a cover story for the current issue of TIME called “How to Save Your Newspaper”, in which he illustrates not how print journalism will succeed by overcoming its ails, but how it will fail by the stubborn…
10 Mistakes in Systems Management
I’ve seen the inside of lots and lots of businesses over the past decade or so. Though the technology has changed somewhat dramatically in many areas of the data center, the general, high-level methodologies for building a sane environment can still be applied. While the implementation is typically done by system administrators, it also helps…
Throw out your Perl: One-line aggregation in awk
I ran into a student from a class I taught last summer. He’s a really sharp guy, and when I first met him, I was impressed with just how much Perl he could stuff into his brain’s cache. He would write what he called ‘one-liners’ in Perl that, in reality, took up 5-10 lines in…
Teaching a Course on Profiling and Debugging in Linux
Dear Lazyweb, So, I’ve been in Chicago for a week teaching a beginner and an intermediate course on using and administering Linux machines. This week, I’ll teach an intermediate and an advanced course on Linux, and the advanced course will cover profiling and debugging. The main tools I’m covering will be valgrind and oprofile, though…
Shell Scripting: Bash Arrays
I’m actually not a huge fan of shell scripting, in spite of the fact that I’ve been doing it for years, and am fairly adept at it. I guess because the shell wasn’t really intended to be used for programming per se, it has evolved into something that sorta kinda looks like a programming language…
Heading to Chicago
I’ll be landing in Chicago tonight, assuming all goes well. I’ll be there through Jan 23. If there are any Linux User Groups, LOPSA meetings, Python user groups, or anything else cool (a brewer’s club maybe?) then find me on twitter (bkjones), or shoot me an email (same name, at gmail). I’m teaching courses on…