Filtered Index

When a company considers virtualizing some part of its infrastructure what is really wanted to be virtualized? The entire machine? The OS? Software within the OS? What other features are needed? These are some questions I would like to hack out with others so come join in the foray.

Have you ever been coding Java and suddenly wanted to do something using loosely-typed variables or worked out an issue with a little less Java-ness? Have you ever wanted to take advantage of the familiarity people have with some languages (ECMAScript/JavaScript) while still using something that is not a web browser as an environment? Have you ever wanted to debug your JavaScript without refreshing a web page and your cache that just won't seem to ever refresh properly for you? This and more will be covered today with practical examples in both the Novell Identity Manager (IDM) and Novell Sentinel applications plus any other Java-based applications that you may have around your own environment.

Do you need to use Perl modules, other than the ones that are easily installed via YaST?

Rather than download the relevant archive file for a particular Perl module, extracting the contents, then manually making and installing the module, wouldn't it be nice if there was a way of automating that process and tracking module updates?

Do you ever find yourself running a command, pressing the up-arrow, then [Enter], then the up-arrow, then [Enter], then the up-arrow.... this is a great exercise that will get your fingers used to typing random odd key sequences without your eyes paying attention, but otherwise it's a complete waste of time. A command I have come to love helps me point my OCD tendencies to other pointless tasks while running commands over and over for me. Introducing 'watch', because Linux Just Does That.

In computing there are two terms which are often confused: encoding and enciphering. One of them, with 'cipher' in its name, usually best refers to something that is cryptographically enciphered which means it was mathematically mangled in a fashion that the result, regardless of the input, is fairly random, patternless nonsense to the un-key-assisted eye. The other term refers to simply changing data from one form to another at is basic level. One type of encoding is 'base64' encoding, which is used through many areas of computing and can be explained much more-simply than most cryptographic cipher functions (in my opinion). This article is to show how, on many levels, Linux Just Does That.

For a while now I have taken for granted the marvelous functionality commonly referred-to as "workspaces" in the X window system. Anybody using a graphical interface with X already probably has this functionality present by default and in many distributions the feature of multiple workspaces is even enabled by default The idea behind this article is to show how efficiency in the GUI can be improved using this feature and the ease of adopting the technology to suit your needs out of the box, because Linux Just Does That.