Tag: package management

“I own many CDs”, the Sphinx said. “I listen to music all the time. But I never play my CDs. What is happening?” That’s easy, a minor-league Sphinx question at best. She ripped her CDs. She used software to read the audio data, convert it to a compressed format, and store the songs as files […]

Reproducibility is a critical component of data science. In fact, it’s critical to all research—witness the reproducibility crisis currently engulfing academic research. It equally important in software development. We all expect our applications to work the same way…time after time. Software that operates erratically is undesirable. The unyielding regularly with which computers perform tasks could […]

The top program displays a constantly updated list of running processes ordered, by default, by CPU usage. Its name comes from its intended use: display the processes that are the top users of system utilization. The joking explanation is that it’s called “top” because it’s always at or near the top of its own output. […]

I was recently surprised when I found myself CC’ed on a forwarded email from a company marketing itself as a significant provider of cloud computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (or IaaS). The message, from one of the cloud provider’s engineers to a group mostly comprised of his co-workers, bore what to him had been surprising news: Hey, there's […]

The vi editor is one of the big hurdles in seriously using Linux or any other member of the UNIX family of operating systems. The operating system is configured and controlled almost entirely with simple text files. Until you can comfortably edit them, you have no hope of doing any system administration. It’s not really […]