When you’re working in Unix or Linux or even Mac OS X, there are often times when you need to apply the same command to a list of files.  In this post I’ll show you a couple of quick ways to do this using the bash shell.

At the Agra Fort, on the way to the Public Hall

In a earlier post I wrote about how important it is to have your data backed up.  On my Macs, my main backup utility is Time Machine, which comes pre-installed with the Mac OS.  Time Machine can also back up external hard drives, even though it may not be obvious how to do it.  This article shows you how to change the default settings to do this.

Google reported yesterday that their search engine will now include a website’s speed in the list of factors it uses to decide how high to rank the site in its search results.  In this post I consider what this means for web developers and what steps you can take to make your site faster.

Wow.  This cool Firefox feature has been around since 2005, but I just found out about it a few months ago!  I swear I haven’t been living in a cave all this time.  So if you’re like me and don’t know about this yet, listen up:  In Firefox, you can bookmark a search with a keyword, and then use that keyword in your URL entry field.  As this article shows, you right-click on the input field and select “Add a Keyword for this Search.”  This will allow you to bookmark the search and add a keyword.  I usually use two letter keywords like ‘we’ for weather.com and ‘im’ for imdb.com.

TaskForest Logo

SourceForge.net has a blog in which they feature a different hosted project every day.  Today’s blog entry features my open-source job scheduler, TaskForest.  I’d like to take this opportunity to thank SourceForge for their support of open source software.

A few day ago the data center where I used to host my name servers lost its connection to the Internet for a very long time (almost 36 hours).   Whatever the cause, the web, mail and application servers of customers big and small were dead in the water.  There was no way to reach them via the Internet.  The data center’s owner, who’s a friend of mine, was on the phone with his service providers, getting the issue sorted out.  In the first 24 hours I sent him around five text messages and was able to speak with him a couple of times. However, many of his other clients couldn’t reach him, and some of them even called me asking if I knew what was going on.

Happy with my experience with a custom WordPress installation for this blog, I decided to try using the blogging platform for the TaskForest website.  The two main reasons were the ease of creating RSS feeds and the ability for users to comment on posts or articles.  After a few days of tinkering around, I’ve come to the conclusion that, at least for TaskForest, WordPress would cause more problems than it would solve. Here’s how I came to that conclusion:

I’m not a professional photographer.  I’m merely an student of  the art and science of photography.  Sometimes I think of submitting my pictures to contests or for use by others - not for the money, but for the personal satisfaction.  Now after reading this post by Bob Krist, I’ll make sure to pay attention to photographers’ rights when I submit my pictures anywhere. I will also refuse to buy any product from Frommer’s Travel Guides, and urge you to do the same.

I recently discovered David duChemin’s blog.  I’d like to share a couple of his posts with you.  In ‘Just?’ he offers advice to people who consider themselves ‘just an amateur photographer.’  In his follow-up piece ‘Confessions of a So-Called PRO’ he serves up an ‘anti-pep-talk’ that demonstrates that professional photographers aren’t necessarily that different from amateurs like you and me.

Fish

A File

I remember in my first Computer Programming class in college, the instructors wanted to make sure we understood the concept of persistence by saving application data to disk.  To keep things simple we would serialize data and save it to text files.  Once we learned advanced concepts we migrated to using relational databases.  As a professional, most of the apps I see use an RDBMS like DB2, PostgreSQL, Sybase or Oracle.  Text files have been relegated to the simple homework assignments of Programming 101.

There are, however, many classes of applications for which text files are the preferred means of storing data.  One of the main reasons is that when data is stored in a relational database, editing it is not a trivial task.  A well-normalized database is not easily updated via an SQL command line.  More often than not, a dedicated, graphical editor is needed to model the complex relationships.