Linux on Shivanand Velmurugan — Product leader. Systems thinker.

Working with large C codebases

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Searching for symbols

The product that I work on, has over 22 million lines of source – most of it a nightmare. I use vim as my editor of choice ¹. Both cscope and ctags (integrated into vim), allow me to quickly move between files and lookup definitions of symbols, and help in understanding the challenge-du-jour.

Throw in fuzzy find capabilities of the most awesome Ctrl+p plugin, and vim becomes the best ‘IDE’ out there!

Use Linux, learn new things

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

After 12+ years, I built a workstation from scratch. Hardware has come such a long way, but that is a post unto itself. Having always worked with Ubuntu and other debian variants it was time to venture into a more lean distro. I picked Arch Linux, on the recommendation of several colleagues. It’s been fun. Pacman and Yaourt are great package managers, and the rolling release model ensures access to the bleeding edge all the time.

Sometimes, they are useful for a lifetime

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

And sometimes, they barely hold your attention. However, the recent acquisition is the former. I got the mammoth of a book, over the weekend; it weighs a ton and I’ll be sleeping with it, clutched tight in my hands.

If you already have the tomb by tanenbaum of similar name, the unix programming interface, you probably are not going to glean much value from this one (you can thank POSIX for maintaining a modicum of consistency over the years and some would vehemently contest that). That said, if you write code for *nix systems, it definitely deserves the shelf-space as much as any other programming book.

Job Control on \*NIX systems

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you are not a UNIX user/not a geek, please turn away right now.

Every year, I either chance upon something new, or remind myself of something interesting that I’ve forgotten. This is the latter case. On a *NIX shell, you can push a foreground process to background (obviously without terminating it):

$ ./someprocess ... ... ... Ctrl-Z [1]+ Stopped ./someprocess $ bg [1]+ ./someprocess &

To bring the process into foreground:

Linux, preinstalled on PCs - It about time

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

And the timing is perfect. Mr Dell, as it turns out (a little Douglassy, eh? Don’t get it, read “Salmon of Doubt”, the last book by Douglas Adams, pg 27), runs Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn on his home PC. Well, one of his PCs, he has four mamoths with 4GB RAM and a Quadro FX 3500 et al, costing well over $4000. Aparently, he also runs windows as well. Hmmm… living the high life.

MS Vs Apple: Which is more secure?

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Marius Oiaga of Softpedia News argues that Windows Vista is more secure than MAC OSX, on the grounds that there are more security patches for MACOSX in a 1 month period. Now, how naive is that?!! Developers at Microsoft are probably just catching their breaths after years of trying to get Windows Vista out of the “window” (excuse the pun).

Now, why is Mac OSX more secure that Windows. Well, you never need to run as administrator (root, in unix speak) to get all applications to work efficiently. Since it is based on BSD unix (FreeBSD), Mac OSX’ architecture is definetely much more secure. Also, take into account, the fact, that there are only 6% of users on Mac OSX, and hence proves to be a very unlikely target for security breaches.