Linux Journal December 2011

The Customer Is Always Right

This is the time of year when the
Linux Journal staff turns to you,
our readers, for insight on the best
programs in the Linux world. I love this
time of year. No, not because you all do
most of the work, but rather because I
get to see how my preferences compare
to those of our readership. You get to
do the same. Whether you’re looking
for validation with your software choices
or hoping to fill a gap in your digital
repertoire, this issue should please.

Along with the Readers’ Choice winners,
we have an issue full of “choice” articles
we’ve picked to go along with this month’s
theme. Reuven M. Lerner shows us an
easy way to scale Web applications with
Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS).
Amazon makes scaling services simple, and
Web applications are no exception. Dave
Taylor describes how to make a scale of
our own for rating Twitter accounts. Using
scripting (Dave’s specialty), extracting data
about a Twitter account is pretty simple.
Come up with your own formulas for what
makes tweets terrific, and you can make a
script that is judge and jury all in one.

Our other command-line guru, Kyle
Rankin, teaches us to laugh in the face of
E Ink and scoff at the Kindles of Amazon.
In the same way Kyle chats with Irssi,
e-mails with Mutt and system-administers
from an xterm, this month he shows how
to read Linux Journal with his e-reader
of choice: a terminal window. If you’re a
minimalist like Kyle or just like to out-geek
the person next to you, you’ll want to read
Kyle’s article. At the very least, it will make
you thankful for your digital e-reader!

Michael Nugent addresses a problem this
month that is near and dear to me. Every
sysadmin should have a monitoring system,
but what happens when that monitoring
system is more annoying than helpful? I
get daily e-mail messages from several of
my systems with reports on their success or
failure. After 20–30 days of “all normal”,
the messages tend to slip past my radar.
Then one day when they stop arriving, their
absence goes unnoticed. The opposite can
be true though as well. How may times
have you been woken up by your pager
beeping incessantly over a false positive? At
3 o’clock in the morning? Michael discusses
some best practices for making your
monitoring system effective at doing its job
while not driving you insane in the process.

If you’re a software developer, you will
want to check out Daniel Bartholomew’s
article on databases. Sure, databases aren’t
the most exciting things in the world, but if
you’re a programmer, interfacing with them
is important. Add to that Joey Bernard’s
article on Mercurial for revision control, and
it’s like soup for the programmer’s soul.

We realize not everyone is into
programming though, and for you hardware
hackers, we have a couple exciting articles
as well. James Tandon shows us the opensource
processor OpenRISC and teaches us
some tricks for utilizing it. As a community
that historically has struggled with working
with proprietary hardware, the open-source
hardware idea is very attractive. Roderick
W. Smith helps us stay ahead of the
hardware transition game this month too.
He describes the new EFI boot mechanism
that is slowly taking over the role of BIOS in
computers. Since hardware manufacturers
will be moving more and more toward EFI,
it’s important for us to understand. After
all, “booting up” is a pretty important part
of any operating system—even if it is only
once every few years for Linux users.

Networking folks haven’t been left out
this month either. Paul Amaranth shows
us a pretty neat method of fixing broken
NAT protocols using NF_QUEUE. NAT
works so well anymore, most of us take
it for granted. Sometimes it doesn’t work
as magically as we expect, however, and
Paul shows us how to do some magic of
our own. Bill Childers and Kyle Rankin
close off the issue with a scary, but
educational, story about wiping out their
data center—over and over.

Plus, much more!