Posted by Brad Hudson on Nov 20, 2009
Is it Friday already? Where has the week gone? Whatever, we’ve got lots of good news tidbits for you this week, including several follow-ups to previous stories. Enough jaw-jacking, let’s get to the news.
Operating Systems
This week we got an early alpha of Google Chrome OS, which is slated for full release sometime in Q4 of 2010. ZDNet blogs and Ars technica have three good first looks at Chrome. First up is Adrian Kingsley-Hughes article Chrome OS – The good, the bad and the ugly, and how it fits in with Windows, Mac and Linux.
For a more security related view, Ryan Naraine has an early look into Chrome OS security with Inside the Google Chrome OS security model.
Lastly, Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has his own first look with screenshots in Chrome OS: Internet failing at PC > PC failing at Internet.
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Posted by Yanick Champoux on Sep 28, 2009
On Monday August 31st, Gowlings hosted a debate on open source licenses organized by the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre (FOSSLC).
The debate was conducted between the proponents of three major Open Source licenses: Mike Milinkovich for the EPL, Matt Asay for the GPL, and David Maxwell for the BSD license.
It was organized into three rounds: first the panelists had ten minutes to sell us their license of choice. Then they were given five minutes to rebut points made by the two other panelists. A final one minute was given to rebut any rebuttal. After those three rounds, the audience—both the live one and that watching the feed—asked their questions.
From what I could estimate, between 50 and 70 people physically attended the event. Andrew reported that between 25 and 50 viewed the live feed. Videos of the event are available on the FOSSLC site.
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Posted by Don Seiler on Sep 17, 2008
In the process of scripting a database migration, I was in need of something akin to the GNU basename utility that I know and love on Linux. basename is most famous for taking a full file path string and stripping away the leading path component, returning just the name of the file. This can be emulated in PL/SQL with calls to SUBSTR and INSTR, like this:
substr(dirname,instr(dirname,'/',-1)+1)
(Thanks to Ian Cary, who shared this logic on oracle-l)
As you can see, this simply finds the last occurence of /, which is our directory separator on *nix and Solaris operating systems. On Windows, it would be \. It then returns a substring beginning one character after that last separator until the end of the string. Voila, a basic basename routine!
Upon reading the basename man page again, I found that basename also takes an optional parameter, a suffix string. If this suffix string is provided, basename will also truncate that string from the end. For example:
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