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The stories behind a few O'Reilly "classics"

Tim O'Reilly: "It's amazing to me how books I first published more than 20 years ago are still creating value for readers."

The stories behind a few O'Reilly "classics"

Tim O'Reilly: "It's amazing to me how books I first published more than 20 years ago are still creating value for readers."

On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan

I talked on Friday with Brian Kernighan about Dennis Ritchie, who sadly passed away two weeks ago at the age of 70. To a large extent, Ritchie completed what he started.

Dennis Ritchie's legacy of elegantly useful tools

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity," Dennis Ritchie once said. It's true, and we need more geniuses who share his spirit.

Dennis Ritchie Day

I don't have the convening power of a governor, but for those of us around the world who care, I hereby declare this Sunday, October 30 to be Dennis Ritchie Day.

Developer Week in Review: Two giants fall

Better late than never, a few thoughts on Steve Jobs. Also, a Unix pioneer leaves us, and Google's dirty laundry is accidentally hung out to dry.

Four short links: 21 June 2011

tmux -- GNU Screen-alike, with vertical splits and other goodies. (via Hacker News) Gamifying Education (Escapist) -- a more thoughtful and reasoned approach than crude badgification, but I'd still feel happier meddling with kids' minds if there was research to show efficacy and distribution of results. (via Ed Yong) Rule of 72 (Terry Jones) -- common piece of financial...

Four short links: 10 May 2011

ODB to iPhone Converter -- hardware to connect to your car's onboard computer and display it on an iPhone app. (via Imran Ali) Multitasking Brains (Wired) -- interesting pair of studies: old brains have trouble recovering from distractions; hardcore multitaskers have trouble focusing. (via Stormy Peters) Social Privacy -- Danah Boyd draft paper on teens' attitudes to online privacy....

Four short links: 20 April 2011

PDP-11 Emulator in Javascript, Running V6 UNIX -- blast from the past, and quite a readable emulator (heads up: cd was chdir back then). See also the 1st edition UNIX source on github. (via Hacker News) 2010: The Year of Crowdsourcing Transcription -- hasn't finished yet, as NY Public Library shows. Cultural institutions are huge data sets that need...

Data hand tools

While we have an extraordinary wealth of power data tools at our disposal, we'll be the poorer if we forget the basics. Here's an example of how simple data tools can be put to use.

Developer Week in Review

This week, Unix was for sale, then it wasn't, then it was again. AT&T announced the most poorly kept secret in the history of secrets. And the tablet was all the rage at CES.

I'm a BSD

This week I am taking FreeBSD 8.0 for a spin. So far, I like it enough that it will probably be my normal desktop environment. It seems to have the right stuff: my PC seems markedly faster. FreeBSD's slogan is...

Four short links: 7 April 2010

SproutCore -- open-source HTML5 application framework (i.e., lots of Javascript goodness) that'll work with any backend. To code for this, you put most of the logic in the front-end and leave the back-end much simpler. RDF for Intrepid Unix Hackers -- an interesting series, showing how to use common Unix tools to manipulate RDF data from the commandline. (via...

Announcing O'Reilly Answers - Clever Hacks. Creative Ideas. Innovative Solutions.

We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

Four short links: 8 October 2009

Linux Baby Rocker -- inventive use of a CD drive and the eject command ... (via Hacker News) I Like Unicorn Because It's Unix -- forceful rant about the need to rediscover Unix systems programming. Reminds me of the Varnish notes where the author explains that it works better because it uses the operating system instead of recreating it...

Recursively edit files with sed

Well duh, that's exactly what sed is designed to do. And nowadays most implementations have the handy -i option that makes changes in place without explicitly using an interim file. Which means that I could reduce the work of typing in the Perl script to a single line at the command prompt...

The Command That Humbles Us All

There is one Unix command that most have yet to master.

An Interview with Brian Kernighan: Breeding Little Languages

Following is an excerpt from Masterminds of Programming, by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden. (Adapted for the web). The Unix philosophy of many small tools, powerful in their combination, is evident in the AWK programming language. Its inventors (Al Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan) describe it as a language for syntax-driven pattern matching. Its straightforward syntax and clever selection of useful features make it easy to slice and dice text through one-liners without having to understand parsers and grammars and finite automata. Though its inspiration has spread to general-purpose languages such as Perl, any modern Unix box still has AWK installed and quietly, effectively, working away.

Guess the Book, Episode One: O'Reilly Media on the Streets of Sebastopol

We're so used to the funny animals on our book covers that we don't give them a second thought, but what about the rest of the world? Especially the non-geek world? In this first episode of Guess the Book, we took to the streets of Sebastopol, CA—the world headquarters of O'Reilly Media—to find out what our neighbors might think. For this first foray, we chose Learning the vi Editor, with the "vi Guy" himself, to see if the townspeople could tell us what the book was about, simply by looking at the cover.

Love and UNIX: An Undying Affection

Youthful indiscretions, trysts, dalliances? Programmer and writer Thomas Scoville has had them with every OS from VMS, MVS, and CP/M. He even admits to a short-lived infatuation with Windows. But he's always returned to his one true love, UNIX.

Small Apps, Loosely-Joined Into Contextual Tasks

I spend too much time telling my computer how to do things when I should be able to tell it what I want to do. Perhaps it's time for declarative UIs to replace our procedural UIs.

One Way to Become an O'Reilly Author

Interested in how to become an author for O'Reilly? One way is to make your opinions known on GetSatisfaction! Read more to see how author Rich Rosen both suggested and helped write the newest edition of Mac OS X for Unix Geeks. Also, enter to win a copy of the book!

Science on the Mac

Why bring your *nix app to the Mac if you're a scientist?

UNIX Terminal Command Line Tips for Mac OS X Geeks

Terminal, the Bash shell,and command line applications still have an important place in the Mac's GUI environment. Here are 10 Unix command line tips that even the most Mac GUI loving user will find useful for the Mac toolbox.