johnwfinigan

7 ms·

1.
by johnwfinigan 4y ago
.tar.zst - I have found Zstd to be enormously faster than gzip, bzip2, or xz. Its compression ratio is good and it's available in most Linux distros.
2.
by johnwfinigan 9y ago
On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion about Windows servers instead of Linux! Besides, probably t
3.
by johnwfinigan 9y ago
Experts have to get made somehow. It's not as if Linux is a frozen target where you can count on being "productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time" without going back to the docs sometimes. A g
4.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
Excluding filenames containing newlines, I wonder how many weird corner cases this would reveal: ls | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 rm I've been annoyed by ls and xargs not playing together here and there, but th
5.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
Sure. Basically, we go through the first half or so of Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment fairly sequentially. My first take was to group the example code by topic, but I've realized that it might make more sens
6.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
I am definitely feeling that: I've already had to do some reorganizing as I discover that some of my initial decisions weren't perfect, as to organizing the class repo. By the way, your article has encouraged me to get the student
7.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
I teach a college UNIX systems programming class. This semester I decided to switch to GitHub, and so far, I can't believe I didn't do it earlier. I like to write code in class, and it's great to be able to push every couple
8.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
I have actually used daytime for a "real" use: as a quick and dirty way of eliminating the possibility of guest clock drift when running benchmark scripts inside of emulated guests with unreliable timekeeping. Obviously a bad idea
9.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/c/SEI+C... Has a lot of rules of the form "Do Not ..."
10.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
Only on topic regarding interesting 1970s OS design, but does anybody have a reference with a similar level of technical detail to this one, but for the ICL (now Fujitsu) VME operating system?
11.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
The book "Inside the AS/400" has some really cool exposition on the unique aspects of the AS/400. If I remember right, the disks and memory are in a single address space, and of course, there is a relational database bui
12.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
In the last several months, I listened to the Hardcore History podcast about World War I. I am still struggling with the same question as the article poses, but applied to war instead of disease. I want to believe that it's respectful
13.
by johnwfinigan 11y ago
"Microsoft Edge is also 64-bit, not just by default, but at all times when running on a 64-bit processor." After 32-bit Windows Server went away as of 2008 R2, I didn't expect MS to keep shipping 32-bit client for this long.
14.
by johnwfinigan 12y ago
Running a small datacenter for the last few years, I can totally identify with that quote. On the storage side, I can't help but wonder if it's partially due to incumbent vendors pushing flash as a high markup premium product. I
15.
by johnwfinigan 12y ago
I don't know of any explicit follow up, but there is a ton of interesting info at multicians.org. I think that, for multi-million dollar mainframe timesharing systems, it was easier to make the cost argument for good security, since th
16.
by johnwfinigan 12y ago
According to [1], the original Multics trap door that Thompson cites as his inspiration was distributed, to an Air force installation no less. Tangentially, I'm more fascinated by the fact that Paul Karger, the lead author on [1], was
17.
by johnwfinigan 12y ago
Yes, that timeline error stuck out to me as well. Recently I found Solaris 2.1 physical media, and the date on it is 12/92. My goal is to get old GCC running on it, but first I have to get it running at all. My sun4m is a SparcStation
18.
by johnwfinigan 12y ago
Tim Hunkin's work is unmistakable. After all of these years, The Secret Life of Machines is still some of my favorite television ever. Glad to see he is still at it.