December 21, 2006

  • Linux

    Warning: the following post is kinda geeky. OK, really geeky.

    I wish the world of computers was an all-Linux world. And none of this "Lindows" junk either. Pure Linux.

    In response to my friend Randall, I must say, Mac moved up my approved list substantially when they saw the light and realized that UNIX (and its variants) is actually the superior platform, and created Mac OS X. They even included a UNIX  command prompt (Terminal).

    What's my stake in this?

    I write software for Linux. Specifically, I write web applications in TCL, served by Apache. There are three flavors of TCL on Apache: Rivet, mod_tcl, and Neowebscript. My flavor of choice is Neowebscript, and my web hosting service is actually one of a small handfull (fewer than 20) of web services worldwide running Neowebscript. I've written an online store application, online gradebook application, and an online office scheduling application. (All these applications run on TCL on Apache, via Neowebscript). Each of these is being used by two or more real companies to do real business every day.

    So yes, I wish the world of computers was an all-Linux world. But it's a big world, and I have lots of Windows Server skills too ... in fact 95% of my revenue comes from working with Windows Servers. Since most of my customers run most of their business on Windows Server, last year I even connected these worlds by porting Neowebscript over to IIS / Windows 2003 Server. As a result my applications would still run if Linux and Apache went away (but I would be sad).

    Honk if you understood any of this.

     

Comments (10)

  • Honk Honk! I get it.

    Just the other day I was thinking about my friend who was a NEXT cube fan. I think that was Linux based as well, wasn't it? Unfortunately, it was expensive and didn't have enough followers to make for any real inertia in the retail or business market.

    I have been a Mac user since 1988. My first Mac was a Mac SE (2nd gen. toaster mac with a tiny B&W screen). I love the new OS X and every version gets faster, more stable, and cool to use.

    But the best part of the Mac or Linux environment is the nearly complete lack of viruses. Yeah!

  • That lack of viruses thing is a false sense of security. It's only a matter of time before someone writes a really ugly, advanced virus for the Mac and for Linux, and since Mac and Linux owners are so non-virus-alterted, it will be devestating. Probably infect every internet-connected mac or linux machine within a few days so bad they all have to be factory loaded from CD or restored from an image backup.

    Or worse yet, it will just very quietly add all the macs to the zombie network so they can be used for sending nominal amounts of spam every day without raising any red flags.

    I'm dead serious.

    Watch and see.

  • P.S. Thanks for getting it. I do remember some kind of Next thing. It was some kind of Unix flavor too, I think. And I think the processor was a RISC processor, which I think stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. The idea was with fewer commands for the processor to have to know how to follow, it could be sped up, and it worked, but like you said, never really took off enough. It worked well enough that Microsoft made a version of Windows NT that ran on it.

  • It's been a while since I was fully immersed ... but I can still sed, awk and grep with the best of 'em. 

    As for missionary's comments, I agree.  No viruses is a function of hackers being focused on the dominant commercial platform.  

    Note I said dominant, not best.  I've got AIX UNIX servers running software I support that haven't needed a reboot in 18 months. 

  • is this english? actually, now that macs are becoming more popular, there will be more viruses.

  • Thanks for reading. I feel ... understood.

    Kudos on those AIX UNIX servers.

  • Ah, the unix command line! I am remembering the days that I wrote sed/awk scripts to do all kinds of sys admin tasks. This past year I had to support an old Sun E250 running Solaris 2.8 so I pulled out my old UNIX Sys.V Script programming book. It was like seeing an old friend. Some day when I am done trying to get some of these necessary Cisco certs out of the way I would like to get back to some old-fashioned C and try Tcl or maybe even Python.

  • TCL is easy, easy. You'd have it down in a day.

  • Nice.  Maybe I should work for you.  Although I'm feeling lazy about learning TCL, so give me 2 days, please!

  • Hopefully someday I"ll be able to take you up on that sentiment.

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