Monthly Archives: March 2007

John Backus, 82, Computer Sci Legend

March 21st, 2007

The New York Times has posted an obituary for John Backus. All recent computer science graduates have been exposed to John Backus’ work with BNFs, making him a legend like Djiskstra. John Backus makes up the Backus in the Backus-Naur duo. I admit that I did not remember Backus as the creator of Fortran, but […]

Eight Ball in the Side Pocket

March 15th, 2007

Poor scheduling has been the bane of several projects with which I have had involvement. Ever since the one-month estimate that I gave for my first independent software development project, a shopping cart, a statement by Fred Brooks resonates continually in my mind. In The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks states, “More software projects have gone awry […]

Chrooting SSH/SFTP

March 12th, 2007

Brandon Hutchinson provides a concise howto for chrooting SSH. For recent distributions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (like CentOS), the following may also be needed in addition to Hutchinson’s Fedora Core procedures: $ cp /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /chrootedpath/lib/. $ chmod 666 /chrootedpath/dev/null $ chmod 666 /chrootedpath/dev/zero Running ldd on the sshd binary executable will display the executable’s […]