The first of McIlroy’s dicta is often paraphrased as "do one thing and do it well", which is shortened from "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new ‘features.’"

McIlroy’s example of this dictum is:

Surprising to outsiders is the fact that UNIX compilers produce no listings: printing can be done better and more flexibly by a separate program.

If you open up a manpage for ls on mac, you’ll see that it starts with

ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUW@abcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file …]

That is, the one-letter flags to ls include every lowercase letter except for {jvyz}, 14 uppercase letters, plus @ and 1. That’s 22 + 14 + 2 = 38 single-character options alone.

One of the things that makes the shell an invaluable tool is the amount of available text processing commands, and the ability to easily pipe them into each other to build complex text processing workflows. These commands can make it trivial to perform text and data analysis, convert data between different formats, filter lines, etc.

When working with text data, the philosophy is to break any complex problem you have into a set of smaller ones, and to solve each of them with a specialized tool.

Once in a while a new program really surprises me. Reminiscing a while
ago, I came up with a list of eye-opening Unix gems. Only a couple of
these programs are indispensable or much used. What singles them out is
their originality. I cannot imagine myself inventing any of them.

Meld is a visual diff tool that makes it easier to compare and merge changes in files, directories, Git repos, and more.

As we can see the default Linux disk encryption implementation has a significant impact on our cache latency in worst case scenarios, whereas the patched implementation is indistinguishable from not using encryption at all. In other words the improved encryption implementation does not have any impact at all on our cache response speed, so we basically get it for free! That’s a win!

Ever considered setting up and running your very own git server? It’s actually quite easy! In this post, I’ll outline the steps I took to set up my own so that you can give it a try yourself. But first, why might you even want to go through the trouble of setting up your own server?

After all, there are a wide array of excellent and free to use choices out there, such as GitHub, GitLab, and the up-and-coming sourcehut.

One reason is ownership: in today’s world of corporate surveillance, rampant privacy violations, and data breaches, there is something to be said of truly owning your own data. Both git and the web itself were designed and built on principles of decentralization and distribution. Standing up your own server is one way to tap into that heritage.

It’s also just plain fun, at least if you’re into that sort of thing. You get to build something useful and put your name on it. It’s something you control. You get to decide how it works, how it looks, who can access it, and what exists on it.

Setting up a git server is actually relatively straight-forward. Almost all of the heavy lifting is done by git itself, but I will also introduce a few supplementary tools to handle things like access control and HTTP access.

Pipes are cool! We saw how handy they are in a previous blog post. Let’s look at a typical way to use the pipe operator. We have some output, and we want to look at the first lines of the output. Let’s download The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a fairly long novel.

So I used to work for the US government dealing with a bunch of international weather records and this was constantly causing problems.
Being a US government agency, we naturally used the US government standard.

But most of the time people entering in values used ISO codes 

Published on Feb 27, 2020

For today’s episode of War Stories, Ars Technica sat down with Naughty Dog Co-founder Andy Gavin to talk about the hurdles in bringing the original Crash Bandicoot to gamers around the world. When Andy and his partner Jason Rubin made the decision to bring the action platforming genre into three dimensions, it required living up to their company ethos of “leaving no stone unturned” in the search for memory - even if it meant hacking Sony’s library code.

Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities

Check out this collection of 30 PDF templates for cut-and-fold paper mechanisms and 3D optical illusions.