Dave’s Ramblings

Because I can never seem to be able to remember them… too spoiled with other editors like pico and nano.

Starting an Editing Session

vi filename

where filename is the name of the file to be edited.

Undo Command

u

undo the last command.

Screen Commands

CTL/l

Reprints current screen.

CTL/L

Exposes one more line at top of screen.

CTL/E

Exposes one more line at bottom of screen.

CTL/F

Pages forward one screen.

CTL/B

Pages back one screen.

CTL/D

Pages down half screen.

CTL/U

Pages up half screen.

Cursor Positioning Commands

j

Moves cursor down one line, same column.

k

Moves cursor up one line, same column.

h

Moves cursor back one character.

l

Moves cursor forward one character.

RET

Moves cursor to beginning of next line.

0

Moves cursor to beginning of current line.

$

Moves cursor to end of current line.

SPACE

Moves cursor forward one character.

nG

Moves cursor to beginning of line n. Default is last line of file.

0

Moves the cursor to the first character of the line.

:n

Moves cursor to beginning of line n.

b

Moves the cursor backward to the beginning of the previous word.

e

Moves the cursor backward to the end of the previous word.

w

Moves the cursor forward to the next word.  

/pattern

Moves cursor forward to next occurrence of pattern.

?pattern

Moves cursor backward to next occurrence of pattern.

n

Repeats last / or ? pattern search.  

Text Insertion Commands

a

Appends text after cursor. Terminated by escape key.

A

Appends text at the end of the line. Terminated the escape key.

i

Inserts text before cursor. Terminated by the escape key.

I

Inserts text at the beginning of the line. Terminated by the escape key.

o

Opens new line below the current line for text insertion. Terminated by the escape key.

O

Opens new line above the current line for text insertion. Terminated by the escape key.

DEL

Overwrites last character during text insertion.

ESC

Stops text insertion. The escape key on the DECstations is the F11 key.  

Text Deletion Commands

x

Deletes current character.

dd

Deletes current line.

dw

Deletes the current word.

d)

Deletes the rest of the current sentence.

D, d$

Deletes from cursor to end of line.

P

Puts back text from the previous delete.  

Changing Commands

cw

Changes characters of current word until stopped with escape key.

c$

Changes text up to the end of the line.

C, cc

Changes remaining text on current line until stopped by pressing the escape key.  

~

Changes case of current character.

xp

Transposes current and following characters.

J

Joins current line with next line.

s

Deletes the current character and goes into the insertion mode.

rx

Replaces current character with x.

R

Replaces the following characters until terminated with the escape key.  

Cut and Paste Commands

yy

Puts the current line in a buffer. Does not delete the line from its current position.

p

Places the line in the buffer after the current position of the cursor.  

Appending Files into Current File

:R filename

Inserts the file filename where the cursor was before the “:” was typed.

Exiting vi

ZZ

Exits vi and saves changes.

:wq

Writes changes to current file and quits edit session.

:q!

Quits edit session (no changes made).

As ar as ERP’s in general Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft last year moves them into a huge market for managing huge amounts of data from a centralized or multihomed concentric hub broken up into many pieces, of which seem to end up on numerous hosts due to the large CPU and memory intensive processes and daemons.  I intend to give both of these packages a good workout and see what turns

I write this I’m halfway through the PeopleSoft Tools Install and Administration being training seminar provided by Oracle.  At first glance of the software’s backend it looks to be largely cumbersome and clunky requiring huge amounts of Java servlets on the Application server and applets for the client side.  To manage all the listeners and handlers  to manage all requested through a single centralized Bulletin Board Liason (BBL) seems to be looking for failure given the server resources required just to bring the system up in a bare bones install.  Though both Windows and Unix are fully supported, with with no direct support for Linux but RedHat Enterprise Linux, definitely not my first choice for any Linux distribution.  I think a little tweaking on a cleaner platform such as Slackware would be more appropriate since the overall OS footprint is smaller and able to be better secured without all of RedHat’s proprietary junk to impede server performance, thus leaving more resources available to actually run the applications.  Show me a more robost and just plain faster webserver than Apache capable of handling huge amount of concurrent connections…. anyone?  I didn’t think so, especially one not as crippled down with Java, WebSphere though Apache modified beyond words is just annoying and royal pain to manage, the install and administration isn’t the most pleasant either.  Weblogic, it seems Sun Microsystems has some sort of agreement with BEA or something to deal with licensing.

After day one of the seminar I immediately considered there MUST be a better way of managing this data…. namely using a better programming language for the backend that is more adept and Nativity supports SQL…and one that doesn’t carry the burden of huge licensing costs.  Since a web application is easier from an administrative point of view for end user maintenance (not requiring any updates to end user’s machine for software updates and the like) My first choice would be Apache with PHP and a MySQL backend.  Though MySQL may not be quite as robust as Oracle in some areas it is far easier to manage and fairly scalable, capable of handling just plain HUGE databases without issue.

My search resulted in ZERO open source applications/packages at this platform level.  Looks like an opportunity to bring out some of my brainstorms and try to get them down in code to call my own.  Look out sourceforge, as I can gather some more developers I think this could really fly.

Compiere on the other hand looks promising to some degree, though requiring an Oracle backend RDMS, but claim compliance with other RDMS’s are in the works. Hope to have it up and running over the next couple of days, still got huge downloads running to obtain the needed software portions to even get it installed and running to examine it, install will begin tomorrow.  Then the opportunity to really pound on it to see what it can do.  I’m expecting to see huge performance hits for a low end server, but I will keep an open mind thoughout the evaluation stages.

I think portions of the the world are ready to move from these huge corporate ERP applications to something  with the same functionality but minus the large licensing fees and demand for huge servers required to just get them started. Keeping security and data integrity will always at the top of the list, but leaving built in functions for customizations from simpler templates for presentation.  But all the development power of creating custom queries utilizing PHP.

If you’ve read this far I must have gotten your attention…  Want to jump onboard to see if we can turn this crazy notion from a rouge group of coders, hackers, and developers and turn this idea into a more robust and FREE application suite to rival the ‘Big Boys’ of Oracle/PeopleSoft and SAP? Drop me a line with your comments and suggestions and the number of hours you think you will have available to contribute.

Don’t think it can be done?  Just remember back not too long ago folks said our godfather Linus was crazy and that Linux itself would just fizzle out of existence, never be a competitor in any market.  Yet 10+ years later it still exists, aside from the power hungry ‘geeks’ and nerds’ and is really showing a tremendous presence both in internet webhosting (some 80% or) and making big splashes in corporate networks to manage critical services (those they can’t trust to MicroSoft) as well as desktop software for end users.  So why not a full featured ERP platform?

Ah for as much as I love hacking on stuff, hacking M$ off of devices to replace it with Linux is truly the supreme ‘in your face Billy Boy’. I do it to anything just because it can be done, even if it yields less functionality, it’s still better.

Going to have to dig one of these guys up to to play with now..
Hacking the Microsoft MN-700 courtesy of Mindzeye.

Reuters

Most U.S. businesses say there is very little difference between the cost of maintaining a Windows versus a Linux-based corporate computing environment, according to a new Yankee Group study released on Monday.

The main cost difference, said Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio, is determined by the amount of time it takes to develop applications or ensure the security of servers, the networked computers that store data, crunch numbers and serve up Web pages.

“What we found is that costs are not really dependent on the underlying functionality in the core operating system,” DiDio said.

In the independent study, 88 percent of respondents said that the quality, performance and reliability of Windows was equal to or better than Linux.

Linux, which can be copied and modified freely, unlike proprietary software such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system, has been locked in competition for the last several years against Microsoft’s Windows Server software for a share of the corporate market.

In most cases, both Linux and Windows are growing at the expense of Sun Microsystems’ Unix-based servers, which were instrumental in the growth of the Internet during the 1990s.

DiDio said that most companies–whether large or small–rarely take the huge step of replacing one operating system with another. Instead, they usually add a mix of Windows and Linux server software to expand functionality.

“Server operating systems are largely commoditized,” DiDio said, adding that many companies were not tracking their operating costs closely enough to base their decisions on total cost of ownership, the main cost metric when comparing Linux and Windows.

Matthew Szulik, chief executive of Red Hat, the largest provider of update and support services for Linux, said, however, “Some of our customers track their operating costs down to the penny.”

Microsoft had no immediate comment on the survey.

In terms of security, Yankee Group’s survey showed a sharp rise in companies’ assessment of Microsoft’s security level, bringing it closer to perceived security level of Linux.

On a scale of 1 to 10, companies rated Microsoft’s security at 7.6, double the rating in a similar survey conducted last year. Linux’s rating was mostly the same at 8.3.

DiDio said that Microsoft’s shift to a monthly security update cycle and increased efforts to combat security issues were the main drivers behind its new ratings.

Another key issue for companies was the cost of developing applications or other programs that run on networked computers. DiDio said software tools such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio helped to boost the appeal of the Windows platform.

Overall, however, most companies were content with extracting the most use out of their existing networks and adding Windows or Linux server as needed, depending on specific specific tasks and needs.

“Corporations need more of a reason to move than they need to stay with a platform that they’re on,” DiDio said.

I run SquirrelMail here at the house for a front end for our personal email server, and with it have MailScanner living in front of sendmail, it does a lot of spam filtering, virus scanning, and of course the archive function to save a copy of every email sent/recieved, we have a 14 year old daughter and the ability to research who sent what to whom and when has come in very handy at times.

But alas I have found a limitation, while trying to recover an important email I discoved I have been rather lax in cleaning out the ‘archives’ since Sept, there were 30K+ emails saved…. something is timimg out while trying to sort through all of them, sendmail and Apache are running on a Duron 1200 with 512M DDR RAM on 80G IDE drives, so I doubt its the server, either the PHP driven app can’t deal with all the filters or the session is timing out before they can be processed. Good old ‘pine’ to the rescue to help clean things up a bit. Looks like 20K messages is the max it can deal with…. I’ll have to add that to my ‘to do’ list one of these days to fix.