2014-10-30 Most programs and especially scripts begin as being prototypes. It's important to notice the point when it's time to rework them completely to transform them from prototypes into real programs. This usually means fundamental rework. This usually means, defin- ing concepts, general ways of doing, and data as well as code structures. I use the mysql command line client a lot these days. Writing SQL directly, instead of clicking in phpmyadmin, increases your understanding of what's actually going on. These GUIs satisfy only our wish for not having to think -- how stupid! Worked with Subversion. Compared to modern VCS (like Mercurial or git), SVN is in no aspect superior. SVN's only reason for exist- ing is being better than CVS and thus being a bridge bettween CVS and the modern VCSs. After you went over the bridge, no one will ever miss it. (Java falls in a similar category, I think, just that there the modern alternatives are not as convincing like in the case of VCSs.) As SVN repos are big, expensive and complicated to set up, one tends to have few of them. (It's the same for branches and tags.) In consequence it's common to find repos with several projects inside. For someone who is familiar with modern VCSs, this is an unpleasing situation. Separation of unrelated entities is an im- portant goal in programming, it is as well in systems administra- tion. Servers need to be maintained. This means, someone needs to care that everything's well. This can be done by logging in on the server, reading system mail, checking the load, disk space, last logins, logs, whatever; or one ensures this information is sub- mitted to some central monitoring place. Today, I got access to a server that issued ``new mail'' every minute. The system mail- box was huge (`grep -c ^From\ ') said about half a million mails. Mailx isn't comfortable to skim through such masses of mail. Mutt, however, never finished to sort the mailbox, Eventually, I read the stuff with less. ;-) The problem was a cronjob, running every minute, that failed since several months. No one noticed or cared ... *eek*! You should *never* set up users that have their username as pass- word. I assume that 95% of all login attempts uses this pattern. It might even be more secure if the accounts have empty pass- words, as this is less expected. ;-) http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke