This feed contains the 10 most recent pages in the "computing" category.

The news today, provided by The Register, is that HP has decided to put an end to VMS.

Somehow, the only thing happening in me is a sigh and a silent final goodbye. I think I've seen this coming for years, even though not very consciously... it's been ages since I wrote a single line of DCL, it's a couple of years since I last logged in on a VMS machine... I think I personally let VMS die a long time ago, a slow death.

VMS is worth remembering, though. In many ways, it's a fantastic operating system. Not for the command line, but for the internal functionality. In my mind, nothing beats the system services provided, nothing beats the $QIO and events functionality, it was possible to write a completely event driven program with just a few lines of code.

My life with VMS started 1989/1990, when I landed a part time job as a system manager. Shortly before, I had fallen in love with GNU emacs, and was amazed that there was a pretty damn good port of version 18.55 for VMS. That was a somewhat aged version, though, and I knew that I wanted to be able to use version 18.59 that was the current version at the time. So I started working on porting it and sharing the results, and enhancing things that I wanted to work better than before.
In a few years, I had learned OpenVMS (Digital renamed the operating system to indicate that it got POSIX certified), grew into a good system admin as well as programmer, dived into the free software/opensource community and gained some fame for working on and maintaining the port of emacs for VMS.
A few years later, I started enhancing the port of SSLeay for VMS, later to become the port of OpenSSL. This lead to a job, further enhancements of OpenSSL and a membership in the OpenSSL development team, and somewhere along the way, I became fairly good at writing code that would build and run smootly on multiple operating system families (OpenVMS and Unix, first of all).

In the end, I can't thank VMS enough. It provided me with an entrance to so many things that shaped me for some 20+ years, and has been fun to play with and work with for many of those years.

Today, it's like finally parting from a friend that I've seen slowly fade away over a few years.

Goodbye, friend...

Posted Jun 11, 2013, 10:26:49 AM +0200 | Tags: computing

On dead fish, Thomas tells a story where Joseph Pelrine (who I understand is a fantastic coach of Scrum (development)) compared doing open source to having an affair...

... and I'm going "say what?????"

'cause I actually feel a bit insulted by the comparison, and it really does imply a kind of thinking that could be said in just a few words: "All your brain are belong to us!" (said with an ominous voice). It also implies that a company I work for has anything to do with my free time.

Mind you, I've always made it clear to anyone I've worked for that I do work with open source on my free time, and it has never been a problem, some have even encouraged me to do so on work time, for the simple reason that their benefit was greater than without it (one company was making a piece of software that was based on OpenSSL, on which I worked quite a lot at the time).

In his blog entry, Thomas gives quite a lot of good reasons why working on open source is a good thing, not just for him personally, but also for whoever he works for, in terms of knowledge he brings in to the company and the connections he makes. To that, I'll add a larger view, which is the greater good, where knowledge comes to people in a way that would be difficult otherwise. There are a lot of good programmers out there who have had a lot of training through open source, training that they would perhaps not have had otherwise. And finally, wide spread knowledge as well as all kinds of connections between people bring forward the development of humankind.

Having this reduced to an affair... I lack more words on the matter...

Posted Nov 7, 2010, 4:31:58 PM +0100 | Tags: computing

I'd had it! Going between different places with different WLAN setups and having to change (comment this and uncomment that) /etc/network/interfaces every time finally got to me. And at the same time, I was hitting the same issue, that I really don't have the time to spend a few hours figuring things out the hard way and crafting something together.

Fortunately, at this day and age, it's almost always possible to find someone who's already done the work. A simple search lead me to this excellent page on the matter.

Bless the internet, for being such a bottomless whell of information :-)

Posted Nov 4, 2010, 11:41:37 AM +0100 | Tags: computing

It's been long since I checked out what happens on the email front... being at Stacken this evening, I heard someone talking about "Message Submission something", so I looked it up... and am trying it out on my laptop as we speak... and it works perfectly :-)

Okie, that does it, I'm moving toward using a MSA on my laptop. Fortunately, it was incredibly easy to set up with courier.

Posted Oct 29, 2009, 10:08:34 PM +0100 | Tags: computing

Trust Linux to have what you need... within time ;-)

That's the only conclusion I can come to after experiencing this same "phenomenon" once again.

What am I talking about? Last spring, about half a year ago from now, I bought one of those USB WiFi adapters, brand new, only half expecting it to work on Linux back then. A test later proved my doubts right, it just wouldn't work. I decided, however, to keep it, as it's a fairly well known brand (it's a Netgear WG111)

Now, half a year and a couple of Linux upgrades and updates later, it works perfectly! Which is quite lucky, since current laptops to not have PC Card slots any more, making my old (once trusty, but let's be honest, age does take its toll) Avaya card quite useless. R.I.P.

Posted Oct 4, 2009, 1:05:20 PM +0200 | Tags: computing

To see all of them, check the archive-computing.

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