Archiv der Kategorie: Linux

Shell Scripts

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Shell scripts can be useful for writing small stuff like combining a few commands to pipes or doing a bit of „back ticking“. Even simple loops and if-conditions are possible. And if we want, it is almost a full programming language. A bit hard to tame, maybe, but quite a lot of stuff is possible. Those who like to know more about it may look into startup scripts of typical java software. Often a .bat and a .sh file are provided, where the right jvm is found, the classpath and the execution path and maybe some other environment are put together. In the end the .sh-file is quite a long and unreadable horror story and the .bat file is even much worse, because the cmd-language is just a lot more primitive and less capable and requires even worse hacks.

There are ways to make shell scripts more readable, which by themselves are truly admirable, but I think that route is wrong. We can learn all the Shell functionalities and understand bit by bit even more complex shell scripts, but I think for non trivial shell scripts it is time to switch to real programming languages instead. Scripting languages, of course, for example Perl, Ruby, Python or Lua. We may still execute „shell commands“, that are actually programs in /bin, /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin where they are powerful and more concise than writing purely in that programming language. But a magic for putting together a classpath is much cleaner in Perl than in pure bash (or worse cmd/bat).

This is of course another example of the Golden Hammer anti pattern. We should balance our tool box. Not add specific tools for making any minor task a bit easier on the expense of supporting one more tool, but keep a broad range of tools that in conjunction are very powerful. For example I would retire awk and sed and use either Perl or Ruby instead. We only have to keep them around because a lot of system tools that are just there still rely on them, but for a team I would deprecate awk and sed for new scripts or even for enhancing existing scripts. Bash would be ok only for small scripts, you can invent a line number or a maximum complexity, but for very short scripts I think bash is a legitimate tool.

Switch to Perl, Perl6, Ruby or… when you encounter any of the following:

  • The scripts is getting kind of long (>= 100 lines)
  • You find yourself modularizing it with functions
  • You find yourself using non trivial perl, ruby, sed or awk within the script, for example regex-stuff
  • The script need interaction
  • The scripts needs arrays, numbers or other types
  • More than one or two trivial if-statements or loop-statements are needed
  • Database access is done by the script (SQL or NoSQL)
  • String encoding becomes relevant
  • Quoting levels become an issue

This post was inspired by a similar post on the Isoblog by Kris. And the Shell Style Guide of Google is quite good especially in limiting the area where shell scripts are acceptable.

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Bring your own Device

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This issue is quite controversial and it applies to laptops, tablets and smart phones.
Usually the „bringing“ is not really an issue, you can have anything in your bags and connect it via the mobile phone network as long as it does not absorb the working time.
But usually this implies a bit more.
There are some advantages in having company emails and calendar on a smart phone. This is convenient and useful. But there are some security concerns that should be taken serious. How is the calendar and the emails accessed? How confidential are the emails? Do they pass through servers that we do not trust? What happens, if a phone gets lost?
This is an area, where security concerns are often not taken too serious, because it is cool for top manager to have such devices. And they can just override any worries and concerns, if they like.
This can be compensated by being more restrictive in other areas. 😉
Anyway, the questions should be answered. In addition, the personal preferences for a certain type of phone are very strong. So the phone provided by the company might not be the one that the employee prefers, so there is a big desire to use the own phone or one that is similar to the own phone, which depends on the question of who pays the bills, how much of private telephony is allowed on the company phone and if there are work related calls to abusive times.
Generally the desirable path is to accept this and to find ways to make this secure.

The other issue is about the computer we work with. For some kind of jobs it is clear that the computer of the company is used, for example when selling railroad tickets or working in the post office or in a bank serving customers.

It shows that more creative people and more IT-oriented people like to have more control on the computer they work with.
We like to have hardware that is powerful enough to do the job. We like to be able to install software that helps us do our job. We like to use the OS and the software that we are skilled with. Sometimes it is already useful to be able to install this on the company computer or in a virtual computer within the company computer. Does the company allow this? It should, with some reasonable guidelines.

Some companies allow their employees to use their own laptops instead. They might give some money to pay for this and expect a certain level of equipment for that. Or just allow the employees to buy a laptop with their own money and use it instead of the company computer. They will do so and happily spend the money, even though it is wrong and the company should pay it. But the pain of spending some of the own money is for many people less than the pain of having to use crappy company equipment.

This rises the question of the network drive Q:, the outlook, MS-Word, MS-Excel,…
Actually this is not so much an issue, at least for the group we are talking here. Or becoming less of an issue.
Drive Q: can quite well be accessed from Linux, if the company policies allow it. But actually modern working patterns do not need this any more.
We can use a Wiki, like MediaWiki or Confluence for documentation. This is actually a bit better in many cases and I would see a trend in this direction, at least for IT-oriented teams.
Office-Formats and Email are more and more providing Web-Applications that can be used to work with them on Linux, for example. And MS-Office is already available for Linux, at least for Android, which is a Linux Variant. It might or might not come for Desktop Linux. LibreOffice is most of the time a useful replacement. Maybe better, maybe almost as good, depending on perspective… And there is always the possibility to have a virtual computer running MS-Windows for the absolutely mandatory MS-Windows-programs, if they actually exist. Such an image could be provided and maintained by the company instead of a company computer.

It is better to let the people work. To allow them to use useful tools. To pay them for bringing their own laptop or to allow them to install what they want on the company laptop. I have seen people who quit their job because of issues like this. The whole expensive MS-Windows-oriented universe that has been built in companies for a lot of money proves to be obsolete in some areas. A Wiki, a source code repository, … these things can be accessed over the internet using ssh or https. They can be hosted by third parties, if we trust the third party. Or they can be hosted by the company itself. Some companies work with distributed teams…

It is of course important to figure out a good security policy that allows working with „own“ devices and still provide a sufficient level of security. Maybe we just have to get used to other ways of working and to learn how to solve the problems that they bring us. In the end of the day we will see which companies are more successful. It depends on many factors, but the ability to provide a innovative and powerful IT and to have good people working there and actually getting stuff done is often an important factor.

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tmp-directories

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On all computers we have some concept of a tmp-directory. Typically it is /tmp on Linux- and Unix-systems and something like C:/TEMP plus some subdirectory in each users home directory on MS-Windows.

In terms of software development this tends to be some dark area. Programs like to create some files there, store some stuff there and then maybe remove it, maybe not. And we do not know for sure, when we can delete these files and we actually do not want to care. Linux and Unix-Systems sometimes clear their tmp-directories on reboot, while providing an additional /var/tmp-directory, that survives reboot. Sometimes the tmp-directory is deducted from shared memory, so it is kind of a RAM-disk, but usually stored in the swap partition (or swap file) of our OS. Now this cleanup on reboot does not help too much, when we want to keep our system running for a long time.

These days most computers are somehow dedicated. Either they are virtual computers that run exactly one server application or a set of closely related server applications. Or it is a mobile phone, tablet or desktop computer that is typically used by only one person. But still we should not forget that the system should allow being used by several applications and by several users. So sharing the same tmp-directory for everyone can cause some conflicts. The Unix- and Linux-family has a way of setting file permissions for the tmp-directory itself and for its entries that stop users from reading, changing or deleting each others files, but still there is some concurrency about using the namespace of this one directory, which is usually quite elegantly bypassed by each software by using smart naming or by having the OS create unique names. But I would not consider it ideal. On the other hand, sometimes we might actually want to use the tmp-directory to share something between users or between processes, where this one tmp-directory might come in handy.

The approach of having a separate tmp-directory in each home directory and in a sub directory of each server application’s installation is tempting, because it separates name spaces, allows to disallow reading the directory entries by others and does not mix totally unrelated stuff in one directory. There is a drawback to this. We usually have different storage technologies. Some are optimized for reading, maybe even avoiding redundancy, because the system can be reinstalled. Some use sporadic writing, some are strictly read-only. And some use a lot of reading and writing. Some data is transient, some can be easily restored and some data needs to be stored redundantly to be safe. Depending on that we should aim to put it on Flash disks, or on a different RAID setup of hard disks. This is getting harder with virtualization, but eventually we can get to the point where virtual computers have disks of different characteristics, that are mapped to the appropriate hardware.

So there is no real good answer to this question, but I think that a tmp-directory that is separate from the home directory, but specific to each user, would be the best approach. Will this change? Probably not so easily. But maybe in some distant future.

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Tablet Computers

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The idea of tablet computers is actually quite old and it has been tried a couple of times, at least up to prototypes. Probably a certain level of hardware and software was needed to make them both useful and affordable for enough people to become a mass product. This is actually a quite common thing. Some person, group or company has invented something really good, but they were not able to provide a sufficiently reliable, useful and affordable product to the market or just were not able to leave their home market efficiently. There are just a few examples for this, that I have observed.

  • Tilting trains have been tried in Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, Sweden Switzerland, Canada, France and Japan, in some countries several times. Many efforts become dead ends because the technology was not easily built in an affordable and reliable and maintainable way, so the mechanism was disabled or the trains were put out of service way too early. Italy actually made this technology work, but some of the train sets suffered serious deficiencies in quality, reliability and maintenance. Spain did the Talgo, which is less ambitious, because it uses gravity instead of an active mechanism and provides for a weaker effect. Sweden developed the X2000 trains, which seemed to work more or less well, but were quite expensive. But finally it seems that companies are able to produce good trains with this technology, like the relatively new Swiss ICN-trains.
  • A British company had produced trailer bikes for children already in the 1930s. They have one wheel and are attached to a parent’s bike. These were hard to get and they were almost unknown, even though the idea is great. In the 1990s German companies started to adopt the concept and actually produce them in good quality and sell them internationally, which was off course easier than 60 years earlier. They are now a common concept.
  • In the 1970s many bicycles had three speed hub gears. Derailleur gears already existed, but they were hard to use and fragile. For steeper roads it was possible to use a larger sprocket and to be able to climb slopes at the expense of lacking higher gears for flat sections. A British company produced a 5 speed hub gear, but it was extremely difficult to get and the quality was so poor that it would be almost half of the time in repair for a more active cyclist. Today we see mature hub gears with more than ten gears, but the derailleur technology has also become mature enough for the main stream.

So there are several requirements to success.

Another interesting aspect is that the actual usage might become different than anticipated. I understand that the tablet computers where sold as a „better replacement“ for PCs and Laptops in certain areas. I do not think that this is reasonable. Having a keyboard and a larger screen is usually better and it makes sense to transport a small or even a larger laptop. I have often had an external keyboard on top of the laptop, when I could afford to transport it and anticipated a heavy use. The netbook was so small that it did not hurt to have it in the luggage, but it was eventually hard to expand the memory and to get a replacement. A relatively small laptop still serves the purpose when a real computer is needed, but luggage is constrained.

The tablet computer does have some features that make it worth having one on top of a good phone and different sizes of Laptops. I am using an Android tablet, which is the most common OS for tablets, but there are off course some others, which I do not know well enough to write about them.

It is easier to switch between keyboard types. I am using the Cyrillic keyboard a lot and the computer with which I am writing this text has two external keyboards attached. I can switch with a key sequence, but this approach has its limitations. Probably buying a Laptop in Russia and just knowing the German keyboard without relying on the symbols on the keys would work for me. But the tablet makes this work with very little setup, while buying a physical Cyrillic keyboard in Switzerland is a bit harder, but still easy and buying a Laptop with Cyrillic keyboard layout does need some effort.

When doing small stuff, mostly reading or even some smaller emails, this is much better than the phone, but it can be used in the train, in the park, anywhere, where it is possible to sit. A laptop requires some kind of a table to be reasonably useful. There are seats with tables in the train, but that is a matter of luck to get one.

Finally we currently have a lot of Android Apps. They could be written for „normal“ desktop Linux as well or as web applications. Maybe that will happen. But currently some of them are available for Android, but not or not in a useful way for desktop Linux. This may change and it heavily depends on what we are actually using. But in my case it is true and it proved to be helpful to have the larger screen than on the Android phone.

Concerning the SIM card, I actually went the extra mile in terms of higher price and more effort for buying it in order to get a SIM card slot. I have not used it very much, because the extra SIM card is kind of expensive, moving SIM cards between devices is inconveniant and using the Android phone as a WiFi-Router seems to work well enough. But maybe this is useful when travelling a lot with SIM-cards from many countries to use just all the slots in older and newer phones and tablets and to use the device with the currently preferred SIM card as the WiFi router for all the others.

And finally it can be said that we can now buy fairly affordable good tablet computers. What I am missing is that tools from desktop Linux are usually not available on Android or only in a limited version. But the most common applications, a web browser and an email client are off course working on both…

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Running a Large Number of Servers

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These days we often have to run a large number of servers, and the times where we could afford to manually log into each one to do system administration tasks are mostly over.

It turns out that there are always different approaches to deal with this. In most cases we are talking about virtual hosts, so we have a layer between via the visualization that can help us. We can have a number of master images and create virtual images from those even on demand in a matter of a minute. In case of MS-Windows it is an issue that they have some internal UUID as host-id which should be unique and which is heavily spread throughout the image, but this issue can be ignored if we do not worry about windows domains. Usually we do and I leave dealing with these issues to MS-Windows-experts.

Talking about Linux, we only need to make sure that the network interface is unique, which it is if we use hardware and do not mess around with it, but it is not necessarily if we use visualization and virtual network devices. This issue needs to be addressed, but it is well supported by common visualization tools. Another point is the host name. This is not too hard, because we only need to change it in one or two places, which can easily be done by a script. We can mount the image and do the change. Now the image can contain a start-up script that discovers on boot that it is a fresh copy and uses its host-name to retrieve further setup from some server. And we just have to maintain there which host has which setup. These can be automated to a very high extent. Then we can for example request a certain number of servers with certain software and configuration via an web interface. This creates new host-names, stores the setup with these host-names in its setup table, creates the virtual images, deploys them on any available hardware server and once they have stared they retrieve their setup from the server. We can also have master images that already contain certain predefined setups so that this second step is only needed for minor adjustments. We have to assume that these exist. Yes, this is called cloud technology.

If we keep the data somewhere else, these servers can be discarded and new ones can be created, so there is no need to do too complex stuff on them. Of course we want to run our software on them. So the day long procedure to install our software is not attractive any more. We need mechanisms that can be automated.

Running real hardware is a bit more demanding and for larger servers that might even be justifiable, because they do a lot of work for us. Quite often it is possible to actually do mechanisms quite similar to the virtual world even on real hardware. It is possible to boot the machine from an USB-stick which copies fetches an image and copies it on disk. Again only the host-name needs to be provided and then the rest can be automated. Another approach is to initially boot via the network, which is an option that most of us rarely use, but which is supported by the hardware. For running a large server farm such a hardware and bios setting can just be initially the default and from there machines can install and reconfigure themselves. In this case we probably need to use the Ethernet-address of the network device as a key to our setup table and we need to know what Ethernet addresses are in use. It is a big deal to set up such an environment, but once it is running, it is tremendously efficient. Homogenous hardware is of course essential, maybe an small number of hardware setups, but not a new model with each delivery. It is not enough that the new hardware is named the same as the old one, it needs to be able to run the same images without manual customization. It is possible to have a small number of images, but having to supply already different images for different server setups multiplying there number with the number of the hardware setups can grow out of control, if one of the numbers or both become too large.

Now we also have ways to actually access oure servers. there have been tools to run a shell just simultaneously on n hosts to do exactly the same at once. This is fine if they are exactly the same, but this is something we need to enforce or we need to accept that servers deviate. There are tools around to deal with these issues, but it is actually quite reasonable to do a script based approach. What we do is using ssh-key-exchange to make sure that we can log into the servers from some admin server without password. We can then define a subset of the set of our servers, which can be one, a couple, a large fraction, all or all with a few exceptions, for example. Then we distribute a script with scp to all the target machines in a loop. We run this on each target machine using ssh and parse the outputs to see which have been successful and which not. Here it is usually a good idea to have a farm of test servers to try this out first and then start on a small number of servers before running it on all of them.

The big bang philosophy of applying a change twice a year on the whole server landscape is not really a good idea here, because we can loose all our servers if we make a mistake and this can be hard to recover, although still have the same tools and scripts even for that, unless we really screw things up. So in these scenarios software that supports the interfaces of the previous version for its communication partners is useful, because it allows to do a smooth migration.

Just to give you a few hints: During some coffee break I suggested that Google has around a million servers. Even though there is no hard evidence for this, because this number seems to be confidential and only known to Google employees, I would say that this is a reasonable number. For sure they cannot afford a million system administrators. The whole processes needs to be very stream-lined. Or take the hosting provider where this site is running on. It is possible to have virtual web-hosts, in this case it is multiple sites running on the same virtual or physical machine sharing the same Apache instance with just different directories attached to different URL-patterns. This is available for very little money, again suggesting that they are tremendously efficient.

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Microsoft SQL Server will be available for Linux in 2017

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Microsoft has officially announced that their database MS SQL Server will become available for Linux in 2017.

I think the time has come for this. Since the departure of Steve Ballmer Microsoft has become a little bit less religous and more pragmatic. There are good reasons to be skeptical about companies like Microsoft and Oracle, but having more competition and more choice is a good thing. Maybe the database product from Oracle is slightly better than MS SQL Server, but there are very few projects where this difference really matters. So now we have three important relational DB products: DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL-Server, PostgreSQL and MariaDB (the successor of mySQL). When starting a new project with no specific constraints about the DB I would usually look at PostgreSQL first, because it is a feature rich and powerful open source database. Since database products are usually something that cannot reasonably be changed within one software system for decades this is a good thing, because we never know what the big companies want to do in such a long time scale. If the migration to another DB product is easy, then the software does not really make use of the power and the features of the DB. And it will not be easy anyway.

There are a lot of cases where the combination of MS-SQL-Server with Linux will make a lot of sense. Since there are software systems that make use of this DB product, it gives the flexibility to run the DB on Linux servers. And maybe avoid an expensive migration to another DB product. As I already said it gives one more choice. In development environments where MS-products are commonly used, it gives one more combination. And eventually it will encourage Oracle and IBM a little bit to refrain from excessive price increases.

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How to make a scanned PDF smaller (Linux)

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When scanning a paper, it is possible to use a lot of parameters within xsane. The output format can be chosen also, for example PNG, JPG or PDF. The outcome may be a PDF-file that is way too big, easily more than 10 megabytes for a single page. It is quite easy to transform it to a smaller file:

convert -density 200x200 -quality 60 -compress jpeg \
big-scanned-file.pdf compressed-scanned-file.pdf

Unless you scan very often, it is easier to scan once with a relatively high resolution and then run this conversion with different values for quality and density rather than running the time consuming scan with different xsane settings.

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Chemnitzer Linux-Tage

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In the German city Chemnitz the conference „Chemnitzer Linux-Tage“ (Chemnitz Linux days)
will take place from 2016-03-19 to 2016-03-20.

Links:
* Informatik aktuell (German)
* Wikipedia (German)
* Offiical page (German)

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How to create ISO Date String

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It is a more and more common task that we need to have a date or maybe date with time as String.

There are two reasonable ways to do this:
* We may want the date formatted in the users Locale, whatever that is.
* We want to use a generic date format, that is for a broader audience or for usage in data exchange formats, log files etc.

The first issue is interesting, because it is not always trivial to teach the software to get the right locale and to use it properly… The mechanisms are there and they are often used correctly, but more often this is just working fine for the locale that the software developers where asked to support.

So now the question is, how do we get the ISO-date of today in different environments.

Linux/Unix-Shell (bash, tcsh, …)

date "+%F"

TeX/LaTeX


\def\dayiso{\ifcase\day \or
01\or 02\or 03\or 04\or 05\or 06\or 07\or 08\or 09\or 10\or% 1..10
11\or 12\or 13\or 14\or 15\or 16\or 17\or 18\or 19\or 20\or% 11..20
21\or 22\or 23\or 24\or 25\or 26\or 27\or 28\or 29\or 30\or% 21..30
31\fi}
\def\monthiso{\ifcase\month \or
01\or 02\or 03\or 04\or 05\or 06\or 07\or 08\or 09\or 10\or 11\or 12\fi}
\def\dateiso{\def\today{\number\year-\monthiso-\dayiso}}
\def\todayiso{\number\year-\monthiso-\dayiso}

This can go into a file isodate.sty which can then be included by \include or \input Then using \todayiso in your TeX document will use the current date. To be more precise, it is the date when TeX or LaTeX is called to process the file. This is what I use for my paper letters.

LaTeX

(From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment below):

\usepackage{isodate} % load package
\isodate % switch to ISO format
\today % print date according to current format

Oracle


SELECT TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'YYYY-MM-DD') FROM DUAL;

On Oracle Docs this function is documented.
It can be chosen as a default using ALTER SESSION for the whole session. Or in SQL-developer it can be configured. Then it is ok to just call

SELECT SYSDATE FROM DUAL;

Btw. Oracle allows to add numbers to dates. These are days. Use fractions of a day to add hours or minutes.

PostreSQL

(From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment):

select current_date;
—> 2016-01-08


select now();
—> 2016-01-08 14:37:55.701079+01

Emacs

In Emacs I like to have the current Date immediately:

(defun insert-current-date ()
"inserts the current date"
(interactive)
(insert
(let ((x (current-time-string)))
(concat (substring x 20 24)
"-"
(cdr (assoc (substring x 4 7)
cmode-month-alist))
"-"
(let ((y (substring x 8 9)))
(if (string= y " ") "0" y))
(substring x 9 10)))))
(global-set-key [S-f5] 'insert-current-date)

Pressing Shift-F5 will put the current date into the cursor position, mostly as if it had been typed.

Emacs (better Variant)

(From Thomas, see his comment below):

(defun insert-current-date ()
"Insert current date."
(interactive)
(insert (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d")))

Perl

In Perl we can use a command line call

perl -e 'use POSIX qw/strftime/;print strftime("%F", localtime()), "\n"'

or to use it in larger programms

use POSIX qw/strftime/;
my $isodate_of_today = strftime("%F", localtime());

I am not sure, if this works on MS-Windows as well, but Linux-, Unix- and MacOS-X-users should see this working.

If someone has tried it on Windows, I will be interested to hear about it…
Maybe I will try it out myself…

Perl 5 (second suggestion)

(From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment below):

perl -e 'use DateTime; use 5.10.0; say DateTime->now->strftime(„%F“);‘

Perl 6

(From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment below):

say Date.today;

or

Date.today.say;

Ruby

This is even more elegant than Perl:

ruby -e 'puts Time.new.strftime("%F")'

will do it on the command line.
Or if you like to use it in your Ruby program, just use

d = Time.new
s = d.strftime("%F")

Btw. like in Oracle SQL it is possible add numbers to this. In case of Ruby, you are adding seconds.

It is slightly confusing that Ruby has two different types, Date and Time. Not quite as confusing as Java, but still…
Time is ok for this purpose.

C on Linux / Posix / Unix


#include
#include
#include

main(int argc, char **argv) {

char s[12];
time_t seconds_since_1970 = time(NULL);
struct tm local;
struct tm gmt;
localtime_r(&seconds_since_1970, &local);
gmtime_r(&seconds_since_1970, &gmt);
size_t l1 = strftime(s, 11, "%Y-%m-%d", &local);
printf("local:\t%s\n", s);
size_t l2 = strftime(s, 11, "%Y-%m-%d", &gmt);
printf("gmt:\t%s\n", s);
exit(0);
}

This speeks for itself..
But if you like to know: time() gets the seconds since 1970 as some kind of integer.
localtime_r or gmtime_r convert it into a structur, that has seconds, minutes etc as separate fields.
stftime formats it. Depending on your C it is also possible to use %F.

Scala


import java.util.Date
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat
...
val s : String = new SimpleDateFormat("YYYY-MM-dd").format(new Date())

This uses the ugly Java-7-libraries. We want to go to Java 8 or use Joda time and a wrapper for Scala.

Java 7


import java.util.Date
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat

...
String s = new SimpleDateFormat("YYYY-MM-dd").format(new Date());

Please observe that SimpleDateFormat is not thread safe. So do one of the following:
* initialize it each time with new
* make sure you run only single threaded, forever
* use EJB and have the format as instance variable in a stateless session bean
* protect it with synchronized
* protect it with locks
* make it a thread local variable

In Java 8 or Java 7 with Joda time this is better. And the toString()-method should have ISO8601 as default, but off course including the time part.

Summary

This is quite easy to achieve in many environments.
I could provide more, but maybe I leave this to you in the comments section.
What could be interesting:
* better ways for the ones that I have provided
* other databases
* other editors (vim, sublime, eclipse, idea,…)
* Office packages (Libreoffice and MS-Office)
* C#
* F#
* Clojure
* C on MS-Windows
* Perl and Ruby on MS-Windows
* Java 8
* Scala using better libraries than the Java-7-library for this
* Java using better libraries than the Java-7-library for this
* C++
* PHP
* Python
* Cobol
* JavaScript
* …
If you provide a reasonable solution I will make it part of the article with a reference…
See also Date Formats…

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Changing of Keyboard Mappings with xmodmap

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Introduction

When running a Linux system in its graphical mode, keyboard mappings can be changed by using xmodmap.
Each key on the keyboard has a „keycode“ which can be found out by looking at the output of
xmodmap -pke > current-keyboard
or by running
xev
for trying out the keys.

I am using a modified German keyboard, but off course the ideas can be adapted to any setup.

Given setting as a Basis

You can start with any keyboard, for example with the German keyboard with no dead keys, which is often useful as a starting point. I prefer to modify it a little bit. This allows me to support more languages like Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Spanish and Esperanto. Russian is an issue that I will address in another article. On the other hand it is a good idea to have secondary positions for some symbols that are on keys that might be missing on some physical layouts, like „<", "|" and ">“ on the German keyboard, whose key is just not present in the American keyboard. The third idea is to have two Altgr-keys, because many important symbols are just accessible in conjunction with Altgr and thus easier if there are two Altgr-keys like there are two Shift-keys.

Special characters for Esperanto

For Esperanto (Esperanto explained in Esperanto) the latin alphabet with its 26 letters is needed, even though some of them are never used. And on top of that the following letters are needed as well:
ĉ Ĉ ĝ Ĝ ĵ Ĵ ĥ Ĥ ŝ Ŝ ŭ Ŭ
Unfortunately they have not reused the letters commonly used in Slavic languages and present on many international setups:
č Č ž Ž š Š
but Unicode covers it all and as long as the keyboard does not need to support Slavic or Baltic or Sami languages simultaneously with Esperanto, things should be fine.

A reasonable approach is tu put these symbols on Altgr-C, Altgr-G, Altgr-J, Altgr-H, Altgr-S and Altgr-U.

This can be achieved easily:
Create a file
.xmodmap-ori
by

xmodmap -pke > .xmodmap-ori

.
And a script $HOME/bin/orikb:

#!/bin/sh
xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmap-ori

Look up where the letters S, G, H J C and U are positioned on the keyboard in the xmodmap-ori-file.
Now create a file
.xmodmap-esperanto
using the following command

egrep 'keycode *[0-9]+ *= *[SsGgCcJjHhUu] ' < .xmodmap-ori
and edit it. Leave the part keycode = intact and change it to something like this:

keycode 39 = s S s S scircumflex Scircumflex
keycode 42 = g G g G gcircumflex Gcircumflex
keycode 43 = h H h H hcircumflex Hcircumflex
keycode 44 = j J j J jcircumflex Jcircumflex
keycode 54 = c C c C ccircumflex Ccircumflex
keycode 30 = u U u U ubreve Ubreve

The numbers between "keycode" and "=" could be different on your machine, but the rest should be like that.

Now create two scripts
$HOME/bin/eokb

#!/bin/sh
xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmap-esperanto

and
$HOME/bin/orikb

#!/bin/sh
xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmap-ori

.

Do not forgot to do the

chmod +x $HOME/bin/eokb $HOME/bin/orikb

for your scripts... 🙂

Now you can use eokb for enabling the Esperanto keys and orikb to return to your original setting.
The Esperanto keys will be accessible by using Altgr and the Latin letter they are derived from.

Other language specific characters

In a similar way you can have other characters
å and Å on the A,
ë and Ë on the E
ï and Ï on the I
ø and Ø on the O
æ and Æ on the Ä
ÿ and Ÿ on the Y
ñ and Ñ on the N
< on the , > on the .
| on the -

This allows to write a lot of languages. See what works for you...

Remaining Issues

For Russian I have bought a physical Cyrillic keyboard and I am using it with the setup that is printed on the keys. I might write about this another time.

Generally I like to have two Altgr keys and I can very well live without a windows key. I might write about this another time as well.

Btw. this article has been written for Linux, but it works perfectly well with any other Unix-like system, as long as X11 is used, just think of Aix, HPUX, BSD, Solaris and likewise systems. But Linux is by far the most common unix like desktop system these days.

Here is another approach:
xkbmap

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