Month: June 2008

Techrepublic.com has an short and sweet post about the development of new platforms which are leading developers to work in a more abstract manner, in the sense that you need to care about which operating system your application is going to run on.Check out the post at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=693

Gone are the days when you worked on a Visual Basic app and wished that every machine would run Windows because that is the only Operating system your application would run on. The same applies to Visual Basic.NET . Personally i feel that no new development should be started in Visual Basic.NET. If anybody is in absolute love with .NET he could go in for C# as it is more similar to Java which allows you to shift gears more easily between the 2 languages. I myself was a Visual basic programmer few years ago and can tell you that any language where in you are locked into a particular platform is a sheer wastage of your time and effort and should be seriously avoided.

You can easily set up environmental variables which needs to be available globally for all your applications. This can be done by placing scripts in the /etc/profile.d directory which are executed every time a shell instance is being created.

Example: To set JAVA_HOME environmental variable so that it points to where you have installed java, you can either create a new shell script or edit an existing shell script in the profile.d directory. Type in the follwoing line and save it as java.sh in the directory

JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/latest

You are done. Now every application will know where you have installed java. Now that is one of the easiest things you could do in Linux 🙂

Linux systems have a built in ability to mount ISO files which then can be used as normal cd or dvds . The command to do this is
mount – o loop /path/to/isofile.iso /mount/foldername

Things like this make me love Linux more as performing a similar trick in Windows would have required a third party software to be installed which would mean more work for a lazy guy like me 😉 .