Introduction

I have a terrible confession to make. I am not a spiritual man so, rather than seek penance through the church, I shall document my reasoning here on the web and you can make your own conclusions.

Please go easy on me.

My confession: I can see myself buying a Macintosh later this year.

To some, that may not sound like something to be ashamed of but it’s all a matter of perspective. By trade and education I’m an engineer or scientist; I have short hair, no piercings and virtually no artistic ability (I present the evidence of that here on this web site!). My computer of choice tends to have a barren, baroque user interface. Let’s be honest here, it’s Unix.

Introduction

Talking about C is not easy. Almost all professional programmers have used it at some point and many have a strong attachment to it. I don’t want to start by saying that it’s a poor language, alienating much of my audience, but I figure I’m going to end up doing that anyway so I may as well get it out of the way at the beginning.

Compared to many languages that have come since, and even some that came before, C just isn’t a very good language.

Sri Lanka (nee Ceylon) is famous for its tea and Arthur C. Clarke, but, as I found out, there’s much more to it than that!

We started in Negombo, a beach resort a few miles away from the airport, moved round to take in the ‘Cultural Triangle’, down to Kandy, Adams Peak and a tea plantation. Finally, we headed to Unawatuna, a beach resort near to Galle (and the England – Sri Lanka test series) and then back to Negombo for the last night. We made plenty of stops along the route.

Introduction

PL/SQL is good for many things. It has a structured, Ada-like syntax and can have SQL statements seamlessly embedded in it. Although not compiled right down to machine code, it’s even fairly quick.

But one thing that most people initially have difficulty doing is displaying information on the screen. The first thing I did was to enter what I wanted into a temporary table and use SQL*Plus to select from it. This works well for reports at the like, but it doesn’t work at all if you want to display something independently of a transaction or halfway through a function.

v1.2, 17 January 2001

With the current Linux trend towards multi-million dollar IPO’s and “Open Source” software, much of the emphasis of “free” software has been lost leaving people new to the fold confused and not completely understanding all the implications. This HOWTO will, hopefully, reduce some of that confusion.

## Introduction

What’s in here?

This document talks in non-technical terms about free software, what it means and why you should care about more than just the cost of your software.

Introduction

The open source community does a lot of things right. The internals of a program is one of them. The people who write code do so because they are proud of what they do and want the respect of other people in the community. The beauty of the code is a very important aspect in this acceptance.

The same isn’t necessarily true in the commercial world. Time-scales are much more important than how the guts of a computer system looks and it’s generally not good to be seen spending a bit of time making your code look pretty.

Introduction

Content

Edward Yourdon is a well known and well respected computer scientist, so what useful information can he give you in these circumstances? Surely you’re lumbered with the simple choice between putting up with it or resigning?

# Introduction

Everyone will be very pleased to hear that Oracle’s third attempt at producing a usable database product on Linux has largely been successful. The first two usually worked but only after much aggravation. Forget all the extras that 8.1.6 provides, you can get the thing installed with much less grief!

Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was simple and straight-forward all the time. It is Oracle that we’re talking about here.

Introduction

Many developers would hate to have their master-work described as a mess, but not Larry Wall, creator of Perl and celebrity hacker. The way he sees it, the language is a mess because the problem domain — real life — is also a mess. He has a point.

I first came across Perl a few years ago when I was writing a program that required a certain amount of ‘screen-scraping’ from a telnet session, the ability to retrieve files using FTP, some complex processing and interaction with an Oracle database. This is a fairly messy problem, and one that Perl looked eminently able to solve.

It is now two days after Microsoft’s official release of ‘the next generation’ of their premier operating system, Windows 2000 (n?e, NT5). We’re now at a safe distance to be able to assess the impact it has had on people and the press.

The first interesting thing to note is that on Slashdot, the Internet’s favorite site for hacker-oriented hi-tech news, did not make any announcement. One argument is that Slashdot is Linux, or at least Unix, biased making Windows news irrelevant. I don’t buy that. What Microsoft is doing is important if Linux is to achieve world domination.