June 2003 Archives

I was very jazzed when I realized that I could answer my friend's question with a GNU (GNU's Not Unix see: http://www.gnu.org) answer. What is so utterly cool about this factoid is that he uses an Apple. OS X is a BSD dirivative, which gives it most of the tools that make *nix such a powerful platform. And oh yea, this trick works on Windows too! I am so happy to see a single simple program that will work on all the PC platforms I know anything about. That's real platform independence and it is good for users.

The question was, "How do I mirror a web site easily, if I do not have FTP access to the files?" The answer is really quite simple.

When designers lay out web pages before the final copy is ready, they need to use dummy text. Why reinvent the wheel? Lorem Ipsum is dummy text, and the Lorem Ipsum site will generate paragraphs of the stuff for you. (And lists of it too, if you need them.)

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon recently talked about how Amazon has grown, and where their key expenditures went over their slow but sure rise to profitablity. CBS Marketwatch and Information Week both have more indepth coverage of his speech.

Amazon has grown and changed the way they manage and move information over the years, they have spent more that 3 times as much on technology as fulfillment. This technology allows them to personalize the shopper's experience to a high degree, and I believe this is a big part of their success.

The challenge for me and my small business retail clients is to scale this model effectively. And from $900 Million we have a lot of scaling to do.

The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a collection of reusable perl code building blocks that is freely available. What this means to webmasters is that a number of prewritten scripts are available to use to build scipts you need without having to write every last line of code yourselves. (If you don't even know what perl is, stop reading this and go find out.)

CPAN is also the name of a perl module you can download from the archive. Usually when you first setup perl, you will also setup the CPAN module and then subsequently you can use that module to download other modules from the archive.

To start CPAN in interactive mode from the command line you type:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

The first time you enter the CPAN shell you will be asked a series of configutation questions; the location of various programs on your computer and the you are presneted with a list of mirror sites which you can choose the one(s) nearest to you.

Once you have configured CPAN you can see your configuration by typing :

o conf

This will show you all the current setting for CPAN, and if you ever need to reconfigure the initial values you set, you can do:

o conf init

There are a whole series of configuration varibles you can set, and the ones that got me thinking about htis article are the history file. For some time the CPAN sheel has had readline capabilities, which means that you can get a histoory of the commands you have used in a session. (Amoung other things that his means.)

However, the last time I upgraded CPAN, when I exited it told me that I had notspecified a historyfile so none was written. This made me think about reading the man pages ('man CPAN' not 'man cpan') to see what other variables are in the configuration.

o conf histfile ~/.cpan/histfilename
o conf histsize 200
commit

Specifies that I want a file name histfilename to be created and I want it to be 200 lines long. Now when I exit from CPAN and come back in, I can use command line history to see what commands I executed last time I used the interface.

There's a very good series of articles at Security Focus that examines and debunks a lot of the common reasons for not using anti-Virus software.

• Part 1 - "Windows, Mac, Exchange, and IIS"
• Part 2 - "Attachments, AV Software and Firewalls"

The author, David Harley, is actually aiming at people like me who until recently though they were smart enough that they didn't need anti-Virus software. In fairness to myself, my PC did not have any viruses when I installed the software. As these articles point out it would have been a matter of time, sooner or later I would have been infected.