I'd like to introduce one of the more popular tools used for visualizing data within several scientific disciplines: ParaView. ParaView started as a joint project between Kitware, Inc., and Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 2000. The first public release was version 0.6, which came out in 2002. Since then, ParaView has become one of the most popular visualization packages for visualizing large data sets.

Puppet has long been regarded as nothing more than an open-source software configuration management tool. The company has become a standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. Well, this is about to change. Puppet has evolved and has positioned itself to tackle enterprise-grade problems. All of this and more, was announced on May 2, 2019. So what makes this announcement so exciting? I sat down with Matt Waxman, Puppet's Head of Products to learn more.

The printk() function is a subject of much ongoing consternation among kernel developers. Ostensibly, it's just an output routine for sending text to the console. But unlike a regular print routine, printk() has to be able to work even under extreme conditions, like when something horrible is going on and the system needs to utter a few last clues as it breathes its final breath.

What happens when you release 500,000 human genomes as open source? This. DNA is digital. The three billion chemical bases that make up the human genome encode data not in binary, but in a quaternary system, using four compounds—adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—to represent four genetic "digits": A, C, G and T. Although this came as something of a surprise in 1953, when Watson and Crick proposed an A–T and C–G pairing as a "copying mechanism for genetic material" in their famous double helix paper, it's hard to see how hereditary information could have been transmitted efficiently from generation to generation in any other way. As anyone who has made photocopies of photocopies is aware, analog systems are bad at loss-free transmission, unlike digital encodings. Evolution of progressively more complex structures over millions of years would have been much harder, perhaps impossible, had our genetic material been stored in a purely analog form.

A look at the rich diversity of Linux distributions.

"Linux is an independent implementation of the POSIX operating system specification (basically a public specification of much of the Unix operating system) that has been written entirely from scratch. Linux currently works on IBM PC compatibles with an ISA or EISA bus and a 386 or higher processor. The Linux kernel was written by Linus Torvalds from Finland, and by other volunteers."

It's been great. And we'll make it greater. Most magazines have the life expectancy of a house plant. Such was the betting line for Linux Journal when it started in April 1994. Our budget was a shoestring. The closest our owner, SSC (Specialized System Consultants) came to the magazine business was with the reference cards it published for UNIX, C, VI, Java, Bash and so on. And Linux wasn't even our original focus. Phil Hughes, who ran SSC, wanted to start a free (as in speech, not beer) software magazine, which was hardly a big box office idea. I was a member of the email group doing the planning for that, which started, as I recall, in late 1993. Then, in early 1994, Phil announced to the group that he had made up his mind after finding "this Finnish kid" who had written a UNIX of sorts called Linux.

It's always better to learn from someone else's mistakes than from your own. This weekend we feature Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers as they tell stories from their years as systems administrators. It's a win-win: you get to learn from their experiences, and they get to make snide comments to each other.  It's Always DNS's Fault! by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

Creating a sed-based file substitution tool. A few weeks ago, I was digging through my spam folder and found an email message that started out like this:

How to provide robust monitoring to low-end systems.