Hello there folks! I have been using [BASH](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29) for quite a long time. Yet I feel like there is a lot that I don’t know. The irony is that I am doing the BASH and Linux Basics training for new hires at my firm. I am not that bad, you see. It is just that there is so much to know. And I am never happy with what I know. ...

I thought everyone knew it. But very few actually do. Especially young software engineers. Probably everyone uses a GUI today and don’t interact much with the terminal. In fact many of the new hires at my firm have only heard of the term multiplexer, but never really bothered to use one. So I thought I’d just write a bit about it. I used to be normal putty user till 2011 (which is a shame). Then my friend introduced me to screen. At first I thought “OMG! What a mess! I would have to remember so many commands!”. But in less than a month I was a big fan of screen and had learned a lot more than necessary information about it. When you work in a company that gives you laptops as your primary workstation, your putty session dies off when you dock your laptop off or go to the next floor. So screen helped me maintain my session and made me less worried about saving work on the terminal. And it is so convenient, when I have long running tests or scripts, I just don’t bother waiting, switch to another window and keep working. ...

I was playing around with Windows 8.1 on my computer and I figured out there are some cool shortcuts maybe you haven’t known. Did you know that the icons in your task bar starting after the start button on the left bottom corner of your screen are numbered from 1 - 9. + 1 - opens the application or whatever your 1st icon after the start menu + 2 & and so on. Does the same. + ShiftKey + ...

So you probably know that I have been working with HP’s Vertica. I’m very glad that I had this opportunity to interact with something like this. The technology behind it is pretty new and immature and lacks the power of PL/SQL but the speed that it achieves through massive parallel execution of queries is simply amazing. I don’t know if you have heard of the term K-Safe or K-Safety. When I first heard it, I had no idea what it was. Then after going through some of the documentation I kind of got the point. ...

When I first heard that term, I was worried. I felt ashamed of myself for not knowing it. After all I’ve been writing Perl scripts for almost 3 years now. And I still don’t know what that means. But finally I accepted that computer science is too vast to know everything about everything. You learn it as you get through it. So apparently: Autovivification is the name for what happens when you attempt to assign a nonexistant entry of a hash; Perl actually creates the missing hash entry for the key you specified. You might not have intended that to happen. But Perl does exactly that. I’ve recently seen a bug in my new team because of this very feature or curse of Perl. And it did take a long time for them figure out the root cause of the problem. Because Perl doesn’t complain when this happens. This is more of a logical error than a compile time or run time error. Hence too hard to find. ...

I think as programmers you should read and understand this: http://martinfowler.com/ieeeSoftware/explicit.pdf From the expert in OOAD and related stuff - Martin Fowler.

Hey guys, I tried out DBVisualizer earlier. I liked it and I have blogged about setting that up for your Vertica database. But it is expensive. I mean I can’t buy it for my personal use unless a company actually sponsors me. I’m a poor developer you see. So I searched for alternatives and I kind of liked SQuirrel SQL client. It is a java based open source SQL client which is pretty awesome. First you should go and download it to know what I mean: http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/. ...

Hey there, I guess you have been having a lot fun with your Vertica databases. I thought I’d share some of the things that I did to improve my query performance. Tables and Projections in Vertica In Vertica even though we access data through tables everything is stored in projections which are stored among nodes in various ways depending on the K Safety and the Segmentation options that we choose when creating the table. We can make modifications to these projections manually or run the Database Designer to generate projections for us. Sometimes to get the best performance we have to write query specific projections. ...

I don’t know if you have even heard of this operating system named OpenVMS by HP. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately I have had a chance to work on it. The operating system has a cool feature, file version is built into the OpenVMS file system. But the problem with this is that if you go into a log directory and list out files, the list could get really long. I was just trying to make it display things that I usually use on Linux. ls -lrt ...

I was playing around with Vertica and my friend suddenly asked me what version of Vertica I was using. This was because he was trying to debug something and posted a question to guys from Vertica and they asked him that question. At my workplace we use the same Vertica cluster for development. It is a playground with a lot of restrictions. Without DB Admin access you can’t really explore much in Vertica. But yea we are trying to get the most out it despite all that. ...