Category Archives: Linux

Password Strength Is A Hard Problem

Posted on August 31, 2019 by Gaius

We are all familiar with the classic advice on password strength, a mix of lowercase, uppercase, symbols, numbers, of a certain length. It is trivial to construct a validator for password strength in Python The problem with this is that … Continue reading →

Posted in Cyber, Linux, Microsoft, Python, Random thoughts, SQL Server | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Microsoft Professional Program Cybersecurity

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Gaius

In a previous job, amongst many other things I was responsible for the tending of a small herd of HP DL-whatever servers, ~1500 machines all running RHEL. These were considered mission-critical for the business unit. I used various tools for … Continue reading →

Posted in azure, Cloud, Cyber, edx, Linux, Microsoft, Random thoughts, SQL Server | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Forgotten Features

Posted on February 23, 2019 by Gaius

The ancient wizards who defined the ASCII standard knew what they were doing. ASCII for those who have not come across it, is the standard means of encoding mainly textual data as a stream of 7- or 8-bit bytes¹ for … Continue reading →

Posted in data science, Linux, Python, Random thoughts | Tagged | Leave a comment

WSL is a Game Changer

Posted on June 16, 2018 by Gaius

Why did we (developers) flock to Macbooks? Even if using platform-agnostic languages and/or writing applications that would run on servers, we wanted portable Unix workstations with a high build quality and none of the hardware compatibility issues that come with … Continue reading →

Posted in C++, Linux, Microsoft, Random thoughts, Virt | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Clouds

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Gaius

I have been having a play with some cloud stuff recently, as hinted at in my last post, and have put together some nice Python objects wrapping APIs/command-line tools so I can do things like: VBox is just my local … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud, Linux, Postgres, Python, Random thoughts, Virt | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

2014

Posted on December 28, 2014 by Gaius

So, how was 2014 for me, in tech at least? Pretty good. It has been quite an interesting experience adapting to an all-proprietary tech stack (database, language, IDE, job scheduler) but I feel I am finally getting a grip on … Continue reading →

Posted in BBC, C++, Linux, Ocaml, OCIML, Oracle, Random thoughts | Leave a comment

HOWTO: Install Oracle 12c on Debian Wheezy

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Gaius

I can confirm that the previous post basically works too for the installation of Oracle 12c on 64-bit Debian 7.1/Wheezy, with the following modifications. Using lib64 for the library symlinks: And the following changes to $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib/env_rdbms.mk The bug requiring the … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Oracle | Tagged | 9 Comments

HOWTO: Install Oracle 11gR2 on Debian Wheezy

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Gaius

Oracle 11gR2 on Debian still isn’t an officially supported configuration (10g XE was for a while), but it is perfectly do-able with a little cajoling. Here I am starting with a fresh installation of Debian 7.1 in a VirtualBox VM, … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Oracle | Tagged | 16 Comments

Raspberry Pi: Who is it really for?

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Gaius

There is a lot of discussion on the Internet today about the Raspberry Pi. This is a project over which I am deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, exposure to computing at an early age was enormously influential on my … Continue reading →

Posted in BBC, Linux, Random thoughts | 4 Comments

How To Run Your Own Apps on RAC

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Gaius

RAC, or Real Application Clusters, is Oracle’s proprietary clustering solution, for highly-available databases. Let’s break down the name. The “real” I assume refers to the fact that it is active-active; all nodes in the cluster are available to do useful … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Oracle | 1 Comment