Did you know you can write a webserver in awk or that sed supports conditional jumps? Probably not… These tool (languages, actually) are much more powerful than most people know. The sed & awk combination gives you massive power IF used correctly. Although most people use it for simple tasks like search/replacing or displaying certain…
Joshua Thijssen is a freelance consultant, developer and trainer.
His daily work consists of maintaining code bases, working on different projects and helping other to achieve higher standards in both coding and thinking.
Blog Archives
Encryption operating modes: ECB vs CBC
Today I overheard two colleagues discussing one of my favorite subjects: encryption. The discussion was about that encrypting data (with a normal block cipher) was working perfectly in ECB mode, but not in CBC mode. So, this all leads up to the question: what is ECB and CBC? And when should you use them? Although…
Sed: simple pattern address usage
Most people I know use sed for simple and fast translation of some keyword in files. For instance, changing ports and tags inside configuration files during deployment to production servers. This results in sometimes clumsy scripts to make sure that sed changes a keword on line 4, but not on line 40. Most people I…
Public key cryptography 101
I’ve just uploaded the new slides for my Public Key Cryptography 101 presentation. It consists of 84 (!) slides about the basics of encryption, public key cryptography and implementations. How does it work, what are it’s advantages, disadvantages and practical uses. Off course, this presentation should be accompanied with the talk itself and I’ve submitted…
About using UTF-8 fields in MySQL
I sometimes hear: “make everything utf-8 in your database, and all will be fine”. This so-called advice could not be further from the truth. Indeed, it will take care of internationalization and code-page problems when you use UTF-8, but it comes with a price, which may be too high for you to pay, especially if…
Top-5 certifications for every PHP programmer
Today I’ve passed the Zend Framework Certification exam and with that I can finally close my new years resolution for 2010: doing 12 (tech related) exams in 2010. So I’ve seen a lot of exams, good ones and bad ones and I want to share with you my experience by creating a top-5 of must-have…
Back to basics: two’s complement
I occasionally get into discussions where I find that other lack some basic understanding of the elementary systems which he or she has to work with everyday. Today was such a day: we went into a discussion about that it would be so much nicer to have unsigned tinyint (in mysql) range from -127..128 instead…
10 advanced linux command line tools
Most developers who are working at the command line on a Linux system know the “basic” commands: ls, cd, cat, tail, head, sort, grep, find and others. More “advanced” users will know how to deal with the ‘sed’ and ‘awk’ beasts, or even prefer perl-oneliners. Have the knowledge of bash (scripting) and you find yourself…
Centralising your tools in a custom repository – Part 2
During this blog post I will talk about creating your own custom package repository. However, before you can setup a repository, you need packages. This previous post talks about setting up your custom packages.
Centralising your tools in a custom repository – Part 1
At almost every software company I’ve been involved in, used custom-made tools for various tasks. These tools range from simple shell-scripts for search&replacing data to large deployment-script or even programs that take care of administrative tasks like monitoring, log aggregation and so on. At the good companies, these tools are maintained inside a software repository…
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