Chris Quenelle is a tools developer at Oracle Corp. He's worked on performance and debugging tools at Sun and Oracle for over 15 years. He reads comic books and science fiction, and has more tivos than he can keep track of.

 

May 2013
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Stupid UNIX Tricks #1 : LANG and shell scripts

If you’ve been using UNIX systems for a while (including Mac OS X, Linux or anything else remotely similar) you might know about the LANG environment variable. It’s used to select how your computer treats language-specific features. You can find out more than you ever wanted to know by looking here: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html

Mostly it doesn’t [...]

Table Based Collaboration

I’ve been supporting our department wiki for many years now. The most used feature is basic rich text, as you would expect, but the next most popular feature is tables.

Over time, I’ve identified a particular kind of collaborative function that people engage in when they are coordinating activities. I don’t have a good name [...]

The everpresent “util” module.

Every major library or application I write seems to have a module named “util” these days. I think it represents a kind of “impedance mismatch” between the platform I’m using (C runtime, C++ runtime, python standard libraries) and the platform I *wish* I were using.

Recently, I’ve been writing python code that runs lots of [...]

Virtualization terms

Update: A newer version of this post (find it here) was recently created.

Okay, before I forget, I’m writing it all down.

We have to test against all this stuff, and it’s becoming more and more convenient to use virtualization as a way to share lab resources, so I figured I’d go make sense of [...]

OpenOffice loses this round

I use spreadsheets every now and then for pretty trivial things. Recently I’ve been using google docs spreadsheets because they were online and editable from different locations easily. A few days ago I tried to use OpenOffice for a fairly simple sheet. I’ve used OpenOffice on and off for years and years without ever becoming [...]

Mac OS X — Dock review

I’ve been using Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) for a week or two as my main desktop environment, and I’m really liking the Dock for icons and such. For the last 20 years, I’ve wanted a window manager that combined the quick-launch buttons with the running program icons. I’ve finally gotten my wish. But after [...]

Twitter needs to be commoditized.

Twitter needs to be commoditized. What do I mean by that? I mean that the Twitter message streams need to interoperate with all my other message streams. Twitter is just a bunch of logical message streams from different people. I don’t really care if my messages are coming via twitter or RSS or IM. Why? [...]

OpenID starting to take off (finally)

I found this on del.icio.us/popular: A video showing how to use OpenID to get a portable login that you can use with many different web sites. One password, controlled from one spot. And you can get your free login identity from multiple different web sites offering the OpenID service. Check it out. Back to your [...]