Today’s attention is directed at one of the less well known and certainly one of the least understood and used areas of perl. Although direct manipulation of bits is the only thing that a computer really does, programmatic manipulation thereof has been abstracted out for all but the tasks that can only be solved by its use. Still, there are situations and times when it becomes necessary and proper for one bit to dissolve the logical bonds which hold them to the byte and to assume, amongst the operators and variables of the language, an equal station.
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Tags: Linux, Perl, Programming, tutorials by Jay Ward
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Brett mentioned Cuil, the next big “google killer”, yesterday and I applaud him for keeping a straight face while typing up his review. I’ll sum up ‘Cuil’, in my opinion, quite shortly: over-hyped failure. These days it’s almost ‘fightin words’ to go against the mighty google and there’s a reason for that. Google is, hands down, the best search engine currently available. It’s dependable enough to trust when your in-laws call saying they’re on their way over for thanksgiving dinner and you need a turkey recipe that will knock their socks off because you were just going to order a pizza. Don’t believe me? The proof is in the pudding:
GOOGLE SEARCH
CUIL SEARCH

Ok, so I broke a few ’search engine rules’ while doing that, but google still got me what I wanted; point made, game set. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not against someone doing a better search engine. In fact, I’d welcome it. It would keep the industry fresh and full of new and better ideas. At the very least it’d revitalize the industry even if it were just for a brief moment. Cuil failed to deliver.

I understand that almost everyone is ripping on Cuil today, myself included, and the reason is probably a simple one: We’re disappointed. Google does, indeed, have the search engine market cornered and that makes a great deal of us just a little worried (*tinfoil hat on* if they can censor searches in china, what else can they censor *tinfoil hat off*) . I’d actually like to see Cuil get up, dust itself off, and keep at it. Who knows, maybe one day they will topple google – or at the very least match them.

Tags: Geek Rant by jakob
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Well there is a new search engine on the block. It’s name is Cuil and its built by ex-Google engineers. Similar to Google the initial search page is simplistic and very reminiscent of early Google. I wanted to compare the two though to see what kind of results they return, and that is when the most obvious differences come to light.

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Tags: Geek Rant, General Tech Info, Google by BrettW
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Ok for a change of pace and a little fun i’m gonna do something different this week. Remember those old school games you played over 20 years ago on the old apple’s? Probably the most popular of game is The Oregon Trail. Well scoping around on line i managed to find an emulator for apple II and quite a few games for it.

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Tags: Entertainment by dustin
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The other day, one of my tech friends who is more familiar with linux then I, was talking about being unable to tail log files in windows. A command to do so didn’t immediately come to mind so I got to poking around on the inter tubes for a solution. As it turns out the tail command isn’t installed by default with windows but is available for download. The Microsoft downloads site offers the tail command with the Windows 2003 Resource Kit along with many other tools for administrating Active Directory, cleaning memory, raid configuration and lots more. I installed this kit and immediately noticed that when I typed tail /? at the command prompt I got an error. This error was due to windows not knowing where to find that particular command, so I had to add its location to my path. I right clicked my computer and then clicked properties. then I clicked advanced, then I clicked the button labeled “Environment Variables”. In the section labled “user variable for myusername ” I first clicked path and then clicked edit. I already had a variable in my path statement so I simply added the path to the resource kit install directory with this

;%SystemRoot%C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\

then I clicked ok all the way back out, and then tested by typing tail /? which gave me the syntax to use when tailing a file.

Tags: General Tech Info, Windows Tweaks, tutorials by BrettW
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