My Building Perl Applications and Debugging Perl Applications with Eclipse tutorials have been picked in a list of the top 27 Eclipse tutorials.

You can see the full list here.

When your Unix/Linux system starts going slowly, you need to find out why, and quickly, what is going on. That’s the focus of my new SAT piece: Monitoring a slow system.

From the intro:

When your UNIX system runs slow, it is vital that you discover what the problem is as quickly as possible so you can get your system back into the normal operating mode. There are many causes for a slow system, but actually identifying the problem can be exceedingly difficult. In this article, study examples of how to identify and diagnose the cause of your slow running UNIX system to get your machine running properly again.

Read the full article.

The latest in my reviews of hosting provider open source software is available at Free Software Magazine.

You can read the full review here.

Wikipedia is a Wiki - basically a information storage engine that works entirely through a web interface. I describe it more succinctly in the article:

A Wiki - of which MediaWiki is one of the most widely used and best known - provides a simple, web-based environment that enables users to collaborate and provide and share information. Wikis are not about discussions, and they are not about regular articles or posts, like a blog.

I have a number of installations, including one that I use to record and document the internal systems here. A companion blog documents changes. There’ll be more about that over on MCslp Coalface soon.

I’ve managed to find some photos of me presenting my keynote at LoCA 2006.

You can view the full set of all photos here. I’m the guy in white.

The somewhat jaded faces are nothing to do with my presentation, but the late night and then early morning start that the group had had the night before!

Lex and yacc are two tools that you may be aware of, but have maybe never used. They are key components to compilers, configuration tools and many different languages, where the ability to parse text and generate some other output (assembly code, or simply to understand the contents). To explain how the system works, I have a new tutorial at IBM developerWorks.

Entitle Writing text parsers with yac and lex, the tutorial primarily focuses on how the two tools work. To demonstrate the significance of precedence (order of execution) and structure, I use calculators as the main example, before moving on to how to parse and understand text.

You can read the article through this link, but you may also want to use the additional examples that I placed onto MCslp Coalface.

There are two follow-up articles:

• Building an RPN to Equation Parser
• Building an Equation to RPN Parser

These demonstrate how you can modify the output generated by, for example, an RPN parser so that it outputs normal equations, and vice versa. There’s an example in the tutorial the covers shows how you can link these two together.

As previously announced, I presented the keynote at LoCA 2006.

The keynote was on Google Maps and Google Earth, related to the new book which I just announced on the book’s new companion website.

I’d like to think that the presentation went well - we started late (due to Dublin traffic, the attendees had trouble getting in - my taxi, by comparison, got us there an hour early), but we finished even later as the questions and queries came thick and fast. We had a taxi booked at 11:00am to take us to the airport, but by 11:15am my wife had to come and collect me to ensure we made it for the flight.

If any LoCA attendees want to comment, please feel free!

As to the book - and apologies to those from LoCA who I instructed to visit this site for more information - I’m just in the process of organizing the examples and downloadable book content today.

As part of the ongoing System Administrators Toolkit series at developerWorks (which started with Process Administration Tricks, the next one in the series has been published, Time and event management.

The overview:

Automating your administration tasks can save you a lot of time, and UNIX incorporates systems to automate the process for you. In this article, you’ll look at the best methods for using these systems, including how to monitor and track their execution and output and how to schedule complex events.

Essentially, we’re looking at cron, crontabs and at, albeit with some useful tricks to get round some of the issues of those solutions.

Read the full article.

My IBM developerWorks article on Building grid applications based on SOA has been picked up as a featured piece over at the The Globus Consortium Journal.

IBM have created a new developerWorks zone dedicated to AIX and Unix.

This zone was one I had input on, both in terms of the focus and the initial range of articles and tutorials that are being posted up there.

The focus is almost 100% on Unix, rather than Linux, technologies, although it is almost inevitable that some Linux related content will creep in there too.

Quite a few of my recent articles and tutorials at developerWorks were originally designed for this new zone, including:

Retool your Linux skills for commercial UNIX

Examine how to best migrate your Linux(R) skills to take advantage of AIX and Solaris. Linux is all the rage, but what if you have experience in Linux and need to apply it to a commercial UNIX environment? UNIX and Linux are similar, and many of the same principles exist; there is a shell, root is still all powerful, and many of the tools and applications are the same. But how do you cope with understanding the nuances and differences?

Write software for multiple UNIX platforms

If you write software for more than one UNIX platform, you are aware of the difficulty of getting your software to compile on two platforms. This tutorial covers tools and tricks that can make the process of supporting different UNIX platforms significantly easier at the code level. The reason is not the lack of tools or a binary compatibility issue, but rather the problems with the header files and functions that set up a standard UNIX environment.

Make UNIX and Linux work together

Examine how to use the Network Information Service (NIS) to share core databases between Linux and UNIX, and how to use the Network File System (NFS) to share file systems, both with direct links and through the automounter. Although UNIX and Linux are similar, there are some differences between the two that can complicate the process of integrating the two systems. Both, for example, share the same authentication system, but most systems are also standalone. Sharing this authentication information enables you to provide a single sign-on (SSO) functionality to any of the servers in your network.

System Administrators Toolkit: Process administration tricks

Discover how to get the information you want on UNIX processes. Knowing what is running on your UNIX system is one of the most basic requirements of any system administrator. The standard process list is useful, but often the information that it provides is not in the right format or doesn’t contain exactly the processes or information you need. In this article, you’ll examine how to extend that process further to improve the readability of the information, or provide summaries and information that are not easily obtainable elsewhere. You’ll also look at methods for standardizing how to obtain process information across different UNIX platforms.

One of those is new overnight - Make UNIX and Linux work together - and the System Administrators Toolkit: Process administration tricks is part of a new series.

This is going to be a busy little zone for the next few months. If you have a suggestion for an article, or something you would particularly like to see on the topic of Unix, please feel free to contact me and let me know.

I will be doing the opening keynote presentation for the 2nd International Workshopo on Location and Context-Awareness (LoCA 2006) in Dublin, on May 10th. The focus of the keynote is Google Maps and Google Earth, which of course ties in nicely to my new book, Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth.

I’ll be announcing that book properly once it’s all been finalized, at the moment we’re going through the final stages of editing and proofing. There is however a website dedicated to the new book (and mapping technology/Google Maps etc in general) called MCslp Maps. I;ll be posting up the examples and the code from the book over the next two weeks.

Back to LoCA 2006, it looks like an interesting workshop, covering issues from Google Maps style location and information through to the identification and location of smaller items, like computers and hardware within offices. Registration is still open, but if you are unable to attend, I’ll probably be posting up the keynote after the conference.