Older blog entries for kjw (starting at number 8)

I'm about half-way through an article on the long-running processes started by default on Mac OS X 10.3. I remember having questions about what each process did before I started developing for OS X (when I became fairly intimate with most of them), and I hope this will provide a handy reference for those who just want their question answered.

I'm getting quite a few referrals from Google these days, mostly for the article on DHCP configuration in Solaris. The traffic to the site is still around 60% myself, search bots, and W3C's validation service; I expect this to change in time.

The next article up will likely be an introduction to svcs(1) and svcadm(1m). I want to learn more about the services setup, and that seems like a good prerequisite for writing another article about how to integrate new services into the system.

Manpage mania

Another article that's coming slowly is the article on manpage extensions. I'm trying to research why some of the directories are called what they are. One in particular that's getting my goat is /usr/ccs -- does anyone remember what ccs stands for? I used to know, but I find myself unsure now.

Package panic

Another article that will be started soon is an initial article on installing, querying, and uninstalling packages in Solaris. Again, an article about building packages will follow at some point.

Part of my drive for writing the first article sooner rather than later is the gotcha with the -d option to the package tools -- I see a lot of questions in forums, etc. about people not understanding it. It's also something I've had to rediscover every time I've gotten close to Solaris (about 8, 4, and 0 years ago).

New ideas

If anyone has any ideas for articles, or if you want to have one posted that you've written, please contact me via the site. I figure I have enough ideas to keep me busy for the next two weeks or so.

There is a new article-in-progress that details the initial set of processes of a Mac OS X 10.3 installation. In short, it briefly explains each process in order of appearance (insofar as PID is concerned), and what happens if you kill it.

As usual, let me know what you think -- comments, questions, suggestions, etc.

The article for DHCP setup of a network interface is done.

Paul Graham has a good article on writing well on his site now. I have it printed and hanging on my wall in an effort to remind me.

The proper domain name finally works. Yay.

I've started an article (not posted yet) on standard and non-standard manpage extensions for all Unix systems. This will probably be the first article in the new "All Unix systems" section.

If you know of any extensions that should be added, please let me know. I have Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris covered.

Got part-way through writing an article about the interplay between ifconfig(1m) and dhcpagent(1m), and how to do basic DHCP stuff with ifconfig. Not exactly rocket science, but it's not obvious to someone coming from most open source Unix systems, either.

Googlebot has been hitting the front page of unixkb since pretty much immediately after I linked to it, but it took its first crawl of the whole site today. If a bot could laugh, I'm sure it would have.

Made a couple of minor changes to the author page format, and made templates for author pages and articles. I got a compliment the other day about the amount of whitespace and easy readability of the pages. This was before I did my latest set of tweaks, but hopefully not much has been lost.

I've started an article on simple network interface configuration with DHCP for Solaris. It was one of the "gotchas" I experienced when I switched, and I would imagine it got others, too. I vaguely remembered seeing reference to DHCP in the ifconfig manpage some years ago, so it didn't take too long to figure out, fortunately.

I've started a list of other articles I'd like to write. I've got about half a dozen ideas for articles on Solaris so far. It's easiest to think of articles for the OS that's newest to me, because I'm still on a steeper edge of the learning curve than the others. It's a bit more difficult thinking of articles to write about Linux or Mac OS X, for example.

If anyone has any article suggestions, please send them my way -- I prefer to work on two or three articles at once, so if I'm feeling stopped up on one, I can just switch to another. Just describe the premise of the article and the platform, and I'll do my best.

If you've got a bit of time and some motivation, write an article yourself -- it may not give you fame and fortune, but it may give you a warm, fuzzy feeling. Maybe.

Things are now looking much more like a real website now. 15 XHTML pages so far, and only three have any real content, but I have a lot of the infrastructure working. A sample author page, a first article (guidelines for unixkb articles), and a lot of playing with divs to make things purty.

Feel free to e-mail me with comments or suggestions -- I'm all ears.

Ruby On Rails

I had the "getting it" moment with Ruby On Rails the other day. Sweet.

Got web hosting through TextDrive, and I'm loving it. Fully scripting friendly (Ruby, Python, Perl), and a great set-up.

Starting work on a site that will hopefully obviate the need to Google for Unix info. It'll take a long while before it gets to that point, but check my homepage URL above for a description of what might go on.

Not long ago, I bought a new x86 (really, Athlon XP) box. Imagine my surprise when Linux didn't support the hardware as well as I would have hoped (NIC support was somewhat lacking, CD-RW support was entirely missing, no support for the graphics card, minimal support for my IDE chipset...).

To make a long story short, enter FreeBSD 5.3. I'd wanted to get back on a BSD for a while anyways, and this was a good opportunity to see what the new generation of FreeBSD had to offer. Apparently, it offers excellent support for my NIC, full support for my CD-RW, accelerated support for my graphics chipset, proper UDMA support for my IDE chipset, and generally fits like a glove.

PHP5

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Apparently, this is not the case with writing CGI scripts. As a recently-diagnosed type 1 diabetic (diabetes mellitus), I started looking about for good diabetic logbook programs. There aren't a lot of them out there, and the ones that are out there certainly aren't free. The few that are free certainly aren't what I'm looking for.

I started work on a CGI-based system while I was still in the hospital (I was there for a week), but I hardly got through the authentication and security code before I was driven to the brink of insanity. I hate CGI now. I used to love it to little pieces, but not any more.

Another recent acquisition is a PalmOne Tungsten C. I figure that with an expensive new toy with 802.11b built in, I kind of owe it to myself to have my logbook be web-accessible. I checked out a few things:

• DrScheme's Scheme servelets
• various flavours of Smalltalk server pages
• Seaside, a web application framework for Squeak Smalltalk
• writing Apache modules in C and Perl
• writing a dedicated server with an ad-hoc XML-based protocol in any one (or more) of a dozen languages

None of these things really looked like a good idea. Too much time spent on the protocol, too much time spent on implementing sessions, too much time spent spinning my wheels.

Just today it occurred to me that PHP5 might be worth a look. I'm glad I looked -- it looks like just the ticket for this sort of application. I got Bluefish built, and once I'm done reading the docs for PHP, I'm going to start tacking some pages together.

Work

Working at Radio Shack now -- been there about ten weeks. There are no real computer jobs in this town, so this is as close as I'm likely to get for a while. I'm doing some tech work on the side, but that mostly involves minor hardware fixes and upgrades and making peoples' XP boxes happy with them again.