Louis J Iacona

Lamport's One-time Aassword Algorithm (or, don't talk to complete strangers!)
A design pattern for securing client/service interactions with OTP

At Your Service     Drawing from the communications world, services fall in one of two broad categories, immediate or deferred. Immediate communication services include teleconferencing, on-line chat, etc.; while deferred services include e-mail and fax. This column presents an overview of the Linux at utility ...
The Awk Tool     Partly tool and partly programming language, awk has had a reputation of being overly complex and difficult to use. This column demonstrates its usefulness without getting hung up on the complexity. Scripting languages such as the UNIX shell and specialty tools like awk and sed have been a standard part of the UNIX landscape since it became commercially available ...
Dogs of the Linux Shell      One incarnation of the so called 80/20 rule has been associated with software systems. It has been observed that 80% of a user population regularly uses only 20% of a system's features. Without backing this up with hard statistics,...
Internationalize Those Bash Scripts Fast forward to 2010, language independence - or Internationalization as it has come to be known - is something that is now expected of commercial grade software. That shell script that I had proudly written back in 1982 was ...
Puppy Linux - Everyone's Pet Linux     It would be fair to say that the Linux landscape is somewhat cluttered with distributions, each offering a slight value delta to consider. So, I didn't expect to be evaluating yet another distro any time soon. Recently, however, I went hunting for an embedded Linux solution for small devices, and along the way, I stumbled on something that offers much more general value than what I was looking for ...

'HATS' off to Legacy Systems   Make a great impact in a short amount of time using available resources.
Get ready for another achronym - HATS (Host Access Transformation Server). Let's begin begin with a notional conversation - an "elevator pitch" or sorts between two IT managers, Jim and Dennis ...