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Computers are evil
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I spend quite a lot of my time sitting, staring, at a computer monitor. I have slowly developed the conclusion that all computers are evil.
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Computer Viruses/Virice/Virii/Virus
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Irrespective of what you thing the plural of computer virus should be, they are a pain in the neck. It is not that I feel particularly at risk, but the fact that their futile attempts at propagation fill my system logs and email spool with junk. So long as certain companies insist on selling insecure and bug-ridden software, people will continue to have computer systems that are at risk. So long as people have systems at risk, a virus will be able to spread. Since "email-aware" and "multiple-exploit" viruses are now trivial to write, the problem is only going to get worse from here.
I would suggest that it is important to look at some of the following sites before you suspect that your PC has a viral infection. You can always pick up a free virus checker from somewhere or other.
Small piece of advice... a personal firewall is a good way to reduce your PC's susceptibility.
Another small piece of advice... backup fairly frequently... you never need to make a backup until it is too late, so do it now instead.
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Linux
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It's a neat OS
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This is the OS* which I mainly use. It is handy to use the same OS on my home machine, my laptop, and on the machine where most of my calculations get run.
I would say that the biggest problem with using Linux is reading the stupid attachments that everybody insists on sending with emails. Microsoft Office does not work on Linux... and even if it did, it would unlikely be popular. As it happens, I can read the great majority of Word documents, Excel workbooks and Powerpoint presentations. I like to be awkward, so I refuse go out of my way to look at them.
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One thing that always surprises me is how Windows programmers insist on stating that there are no integrated development environments for Linux. What? That's because Linux is an IDE. UNIX was the ultimate development platform, but perhaps it isn't now. (Although I must admit that Borland C++ Builder is quite nifty, if you have enough disk space for it. I choose to install Blue Byte's Settlers III instead.)
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Free Books!
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There are a number of technical books that are freely available! What, exactly, is meant by "free" differs between the books. The interesting ones which I have found so far are:
Numerical Recipes - Numerical Recipes in C, 2nd edition is the numerical methods book.
Autobook - GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool.
GGAD - GTK+/Gnome Application Development by Havoc Pennington. I'm not sure which is better, the book or the authors name!
WGA - Writing GNOME Applications by John R. Sheets. Not complete, which is a pity. I'm sure that will change though.
Docbook - The definitive guide to SGML.
CVS book - Open Source Development with CVS by Karl Fogel. It is not quite the complete book, but all of the interesting bits are here.
Linux Cookbook - More than 1500 time-saving recipes and hints for busy computer users.
FreeBSD Handbook - FreeBSD documentation.
Maximum RPM - Documentation for the RedHat package manager.
Actually I have now bought several of these, which is something that I probably wouldn't have done without the chance to browse through them first. It's clearly a good advertising ploy! I just wish that more publishers were amenable to the idea of allowing free access to their books online.
O'Reilly, the computer book publisher, has made several of it's slightly older books available online here. More publishers should do this. When a book is out-of-print, why not make it available to those people that are interested? The publisher won't lose anything, but will gain lots of good will. The O'Reilly books that I've found most interesting/useful are:
Learning Debian/GNU Linux - A book about the Debian distribution of Linux.
Using Samba - All about Samba, the software which allows UNIX/Linux to talk to Microsoft Windows.
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. - All about the open-source movement.
Linux Network Administrator's Guide - 2nd edition of this well-respected book for network administrators.
CGI programming on the World Wide Web - A good, although maybe slightly outdated, introduction to CGI programming.
The text to many books may be found on project gutenberg. Unfortunately these are mostly older books, and the majority are plain text only.
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Useful FAQs
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Computer sites to look at
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Here are a few sites that I've liked.
Source Forge - Great collection of open-source software projects.
Freshmeat - The first place to look for UNIX/Linux applications.
The Open Science Project - Repository of, open-source, scientific applications.
SAL - "Scientific Applications on Linux". The name pretty much explains this site.
AntiCode - Do you fancy looking at the code and exploits crackers and script kiddies use? Look here. I occasionally use this stuff to audit the security on the network I administrate. I also used on of the 'utilities' from this site as the basis of a neat little IP packet interceptor I wrote to track down an odd network problem I once had to deal with. (It turned out to be a dodgy Ethernet cable, so the program wasn't actually any use!) Our Linux boxes aren't too bad, but when I first took over this little network it took no time at all to get root access on one of our SGI workstations. That hole was plugged, but I'm sure there are many more. That's partly why we swapped our server to a nice Linux machine.
Dr Dobb's Journal - A great collection of stuff from the brilliant Dr Dobb's Journal.
Slashdot - News for Nerds - Stuff that matters. (apparently).
Linux Documentation Project - A superb collection of Linux documentation. Who says that Linux is poorly documented?
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Linux
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As you may have guessed by now, Linux is my operating system of choice. I originally started using Linux almost by accident, or maybe just plain good fortune. I had used an old version of Red Hat (4.0 or something) but I did get on with it at all. I was involved in a project that relied on Perl, but at that time there wasn't a reasonable version of Perl for Windows, so I installed FreeBSD on my PC. FreeBSD was a-good-thing which I stuck with for a while. There were two problems though; my zip drive didn't work, and my graphics card wasn't supported by the X windowing system. Poo. The final-year project for my degree contained a certain amount of graphical work, and I decided that I'd much rather work at home with a Beer next to me rather than working in a stuffy computer lab with a smelly student next to me. I was looking for a textbook when I stumbled across a Linux book with the Slackware distribution on an attached CD. Lo and behold, X worked fine (and therefore I could say goodbye to the computer lab), and after a simple piece of kernel patching my zip drive worked too. Linux has been my main OS ever since. I currently use RedHat's distribution with the Ximian GNOME desktop and a home-brewed window manager. |
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Programming
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I'm struggling to build the motivation required to type anything about programming computers. Just look at this Perl site and leave me alone.
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