[Sussex] An introduction and Apache

[Will Earnshaw]

"You doing this as an Applet or using JEE?"

I'll be honest. I am brand new to Java and have only been using it about 
a week or so. Currently all I've really written is an application that 
can dump results from mysql and drawn a few pictures using JGame.
The language I've spent the most time with is C++, but I've never really 
written anything all that impressive. My most technical project is 
probably a space invaders clone that I wrote in SDL. So it's still going 
to be a while before I become any sort of Guru!

"I recently submitted a patch that got included in a perl module for
using git, but I've only recently started code at that kind of level, so
that's my biggest claim to fame when it comes to open-source
contributions so far."

That's incredible! I've never used perl but I've heard about how 
powerful it can be. The only scripting language I've ever used is LUA, 
and not very much of it. But I can see how much more convenient it can 
make programming and would love to get into useing scripting languages 
more often.

"As a developer I develop on Linux exclusively.  As my clients use
Windows in the main I use Java as the programming environment and have
very little problem producing software for Windows platforms even though
I don't have a Windows box available to me."

This is exactly why I decided to start learning it. Mobile computing and 
triple e pcs are becoming more popular so its aobut time we started 
supporting alternate systems.

"You might like to look up a few of the security tools for Linux, such as
snort and nmap (which has the claim to fame of being the application
Trinity used to hack a computer via ssh in The Matrix ;) if you're
worried about your server's security."

Thank you very much for the advice Dominic. Snort looks very 
interesting, but I wonder if it might be a pain to use. I'm not afraid 
of a little hard work or anything, but I'm not really ready to rush into 
setting something massive up (such as a recently failed email setup, 
just thinking back to it makes my head hurt!). My server gets maybe 3 or 
4 hits a week at the very most, as I use it in part of my job searching 
and have a link at the top of my C.V. If some of my ideas take off then 
it might be more appropreate then, but its at least got me thinking in 
the right direction so many thanks.

"If you're going to be using the command line then learning how to read
the man pages (and it is a skill that you will have to learn like I did)
will make using the CLI so much easier."

Yeah! Learning about man pages was one of the first things I did. Like 
programming references, there's a bit of an art to reading them and 
digesting them properly. Something I am still developing to be honest.
It's infuriating when they're half finished, or non exsistant though. I 
guess this isn't so bad these days as anything can be googled, but maybe 
this is an area I could help in.

"That was my talk, and tho I probably won't be giving it again, I did put
a transcript on my blog that you may find useful:
http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2011/05/27/heart-of-linux"

Splended! I'll definatly have a read of that tonight. Thanks!