Aaron

My background with unix is interesting.  Everyone who gets involved with unix gets there one of a handful of ways.  My primary introduction into the unix realm was through perl.  Although perl runs on many architectures and os's.  There is no doubt that the two are tightly coupled.  Many of the built in perl modules and functions take there name directly from there unix/c origins Fcntl -> fcntl.h, opendir, read etc.  The c connections are apparent under the hood.  But most of us happily don't take the time to dive in deeper and really see whats happening under the hood.  For those that want to gain a much deeper understanding of unix, unix systems programming, system calls low level io, devices, drivers, the unix file system, pipes, processes, posix threads you really would stand to gain from reading Bruce Molay's Understanding Unix/Linux Programming.  It is really very well written.  The author presents things in a consistent way and really gets the reader to think by providing interesting non trivial examples.  It will change the way you think about everything you do on a unix box.  In a day when many of us use dynamic languages (perl, python, ruby) or languages like java which try to abstract everything away from a person till he knows nothing, this is an eye opener.  This book will get you in touch with your machine again and hopefully help fill in the blanks.

Django is so easy to use.  It was clearly well thought out.  The url handling is fantastic but, what steals the show is the object oriented templating system.  I'm sure I haven't even scratched the surface.  This is making building web apps clean and fun.[Read More]

dancygier.com relaunch! I finally got around to redoing my website. Not that it was much more than a nice image gallery.  I'm running apache2 on the front with mod_perl, mod_python and svn.  Backend tomcat is serving roller. Stay tuned.[Read More]