Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

eDEX-UI – a sci-fi terminal

eDEX-UI is a science fiction terminal that runs on most operating systems. It was heavily inspired by the user interfaces in sci-fi movies, like TRON, Minority Report, and others. While it’s not very practical for the day-to-day use for anyone heavily using command line, it’s a lot of fun to run when there are non-technical people around, staring at your screen.

The installation is pretty simple:

git clone https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui.git
cd edex-ui
npm run install-linux
npm start

I think it works even better with a large touch screen, but I don’t have one around to try it on.

Awesome Interviews

Awesome Interviews is a curated awesome list of lists of interview questions. Technical interviews, mind you. It covers a wide range of areas from a variety of programming languages, frameworks and databases, to operating systems, data structures and algorithms. There also coding exercises and much more.

This list links to some really great resources for both candidates, who are preparing for the interviews, and interviewers who want to make their interviews better.

Serverless PHP on AWS Lambda

For all those of you who want to try out Amazon Lambda with PHP, here’s a quick and simple guide as to how to set it up: Serverless PHP on AWS Lambda.

This is some pretty exciting stuff!

SSH Examples, Tips & Tunnels

“SSH Examples, Tips & Tunnels” is a nice collection of tips and examples for Secure Shell (ssh) users. It covers a variety of scenarios from simple remote connections, to file copying, to tunnels and jump hosts.

Programmer Playing Cards

I have recently blogged about the Faces of Open Source project. That’s a great initiative. But here’s another one, with a lot more practical approach – Programmer Playing Cards. It is a deck of playing cards, featuring people who influenced the world of computer programming in a variety of ways. Each card has a photo of a person, his or her name, what was the influence, and, as a nice touch, a quote from that person.

Here’s an example with Larry Wall.

More examples as well as instructions on how to get these cards are here.