June 2005
Cameron Laird and Miki Tebeka"Regular Expressions" has written several times before about the Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator (SWIG) tool for connecting program segments written in different languages. This month, we'll look in detail at an example of how SWIG can breathe new life into legacy code.
Russell DyerApress is fairly new to the open source book publishing business. However, in a short amount of time they've put together a nice collection of books. They've done this by buying many titles from Wrox Press, but more importantly by seeking out some good writers with expertise in their field to write new books. So, if you're not familiar with Apress books, you might want to take a look at them. As part of their expansion into the open source arena, they've been publishing some new books on MySQL. One book that I found to be very interesting is Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization by Jon Stephens and Chad Russell.
Joe "Zonker" BrockmeierThis month, I will cover using IMAP to get email. A lot of folks really like IMAP because it allows them to see the same set of "folders" from any mail client, which is a really handy feature if you happen to use more than one computer to check your mail.
Ed SchaeferO'Reilly has publshed the 3rd editon of Learning the bash Shell, by Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatt As you might expect from the title, this book is meant for the Linux novice who wants to learn the bash shell.
Ed Schaefer and John SpurgeonThis installment of miscellaneous Unix tips contains:
* Using tab characters in a Unix here document
* Obtaining version information from a "C" binary
* Using dummy columns to retain relative sort order
Peter SalusThe CD-ROM accompanying Test Driving Linux is for "Move," a customized version of Mandrake that boots directly from the CD (think: Knoppix). It works. I tested it on my wife's DELL laptop, our only non-Linux machine. It took more time to start up Windows than to boot Move.
Joe "Zonker" BrockmeierLike many sys admins, I spend a lot of time browsing the Internet. Probably too much, but that's one of the occupational hazards of being in front of a computer all day. After spending this much time at the computer, I'm heartily sick of animated banner ads, sites trying to set cookies behind my back, various JavaScript annoyances, and so forth. Now, Firefox does a brilliant job of smacking down a lot of pop-ups and other JavaScript annoyances and can take care of some of the cookie issues, but I wanted something in addition to Firefox. That's where Privoxy comes in. Privoxy is based on Internet Junkbuster but includes a number of improvements and new features.
John Graham-CummingRobert Mecklenburg rewrote Managing Projects with make to produce Managing Projects with GNU Make. In doing so, he threw away the original book's style and attempts to cover different Make variants and concentrated on the one Make that matters — GNU Make.
The new book is a flawed, must-have for any serious Makefile hacker. If all your Makefiles are created by ./configure, or they fit on one screen, then this book isn't for you. For everyone else, it's the essential companion volume for the Free Software Foundation's "GNU Make Manual".
Joe "Zonker" BrockmeierThis month, I'll introduce a couple of tools that help visualize system activity and disk usage, even when logged in via the console or an xterm. There are plenty of great GUI applications for visualizing system activity when logged into GNOME, KDE, XFce, or another window manager — but not so many for the console.
Peter SalusThis is a well-written introductory book for those who are confronted by the necessity of becoming Web friendly in short order. But it's not about HTML. It's about XHTML, the W3C's successor to HTML4, which is the first of a series of document types. CSS (= Cascading Style Sheets) is a method for adding fonts, color, spacing, etc. to Web documents.
Kristy WestphalAfter reading Buffer Overflow Attacks, I found myself highly frustrated at anyone who develops code and who doesn't check for buffer overflows. If you are one of those people, and you don't have this book, get a copy. If you don't choose this book, then find a book somewhere that covers this topic to similar depth. It's important to understand this topic and how to prevent buffer overflows because they are one of the oldest and most-used exploits out there.
Emmett DulaneyThe Novell Certified Linux Engineer (CLE) certification, which has been available only for a short time, has gained considerable renown for its difficulty and testing method and is currently in the process of being revamped. The new exam is scheduled to go live in September, and the courses upon which it is based will be made available through Novell training centers in July.
Ed SchaeferThis month, Louis Poehlitz shares a Perl script, daily-back, which he uses to back up his home network to DVD.
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