Roy's musings

If you are looking for a nationwide information database, for casual browsing or for the application that you are developing, you can turn to NationMaster web site. Its pretty good. They maintain a lot of useful information on each nations. And they keep their site updated (thats what I guess, don't blame me!) with latest publications from CIA etc.

To compete with Unix style shells (really?) , the Windows PowerShell is out for you to try. As per the information available in the web site, the PowerShell comes with more than 130 standard command line tools, that will make the automation job of every administrator a breeze. What more, all these tools have been made to have a standard and consistent interface. Why such an insistence on this? Do you know that there is tskill.exe and taskkill.exe ? Though both of them apparently seem to be doing the same business, they are not. The first is a subset of the other and the way you specify the arguments is also a little different. Go ahead ... try now! Like these, there are a couple of more anomalies too. I guess MS is known for such kind of inconsistent interface, at least when it comes to command line interface. Hence it is understood and appreciated when MS says all these tools have a common consistent interface.

You may love Common Lisp, or you may not. The author of the book Practical Common Lisp seems to be bubbling with all positive testimonies to make you try Common Lisp. At least for me, from the Emacs learner's perspective, I think this book would tend to be good reference material. After all, there is nothing wrong in giving a language a try.

I was desperately searching for good books on LDAP, both for understanding as well as programming. I came across the Redbooks web site of IBM, where they maintain an impressive collection of good eBooks. What is more, most of the books can be downloaded in pdf form free of cost. I downloaded and started reading Understanding LDAP book.

I recently came across Palisade web site . Instantly, I liked the contents in the web site and thought of sharing it with the readers. Hopefully you would find it useful too.

There is an open source initiative from Japan to provide a threading library, that would look exactly like the threading model of Java. You can find the details of the project here . One of the advantages that I see, as it is stated in the site, is that a person with good Java programming back ground doesn't have to spend time learning the threading model of different platforms. This library promises to give a uniform threading model across different operating systems.

Many a times I have wondered how some of the sites have an icon appearing before their URL in the address bar. But for some reason there is no icon appearing if I visit my personal page. I recently figured the answer for this while visiting this site . There was a side note appearing in that site, taking me to the Microsoft's article on how to make this icon appear. Hope you would find this useful and interesting. Apart from that, I find ZYTRAX site extremely useful in many ways. They have excellent tutorials on LDAP and DNS. There is a lot more to read about from that site.

I came across this blog through reddit. The title is: The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy. You will find the discussion below the blog entry more interesting and thought provoking than the article itself. Especially a few comments by billb make a lot of sense, really a lot of sense.