About

Site

Content

This is a tech-related blog providing text and video tutorials on Unix, GNU/Linux, programming, automation, systems administration/DevOps, Free Software/Open Source, privacy, security, and ethics.

The landscape of IT has become too wide for anyone to cover multiple areas authoritatively and stay up to date over time. The topics discussed here are fundamental — everyone dealing with computers should be familiar with them.

The key to understanding complex topics is in thoroughly understanding the basics.

This site is provided to inspire you to seek truth, depth, fun, and personal mastery in IT or any other field of your choosing.

Terminology

Unix, BSD, GNU, and Linux are terms of increasingly narrow specificity or scope:

• Unix refers to all Unix-like systems (as described in more detail in the History of Unix, BSD, GNU, and Linux) or to Unix concepts (as described in The Unix Philosophy - Explained and Extended)

• GNU refers to the GNU project or to the free (liberated) implementation of Unix and Unix programs

• Linux refers to the Unix-like kernel called Linux or informally to all GNU/Linux distributions

• GNU/Linux more precisely refers to Linux distributions, i.e. those which combine the GNU userland with the Linux kernel

• BSD refers to operating systems derived from the traditional BSD Unix

Articles on this site use the terms with the broadest applicability in a given context. For example, if a concept originates in Unix, such as the command line, it will be called the “Unix command line” rather than the “Linux command line”, unless the context is specific to Linux.

Links

This site is located at https://crystallabs.io/.

RSS feed is available at https://crystallabs.io/index.xml.

All HTML links external to this site are marked with a “fa-external” icon, such as https://www.eff.org/.

Articles may contain links to other resources. For convenience, all links appearing in an article are listed again at the bottom in a single place, in order of appearance.

Brief History

I started my computer-related journey when I was 6, playing Commodore 64 games like Boulder Dash, Commando and Pitstop.

After many games on the Commodore 64, Atari 1040 STe, PC 386, and PC 486, in 1994 I started programming in Visual Basic 3.0 and 4.0, followed over the years by C, Perl, Java, Ruby, Crystal, Python, JavaScript, and Node.js. I have also used Logo, Oberon, and Go, toolkits STFL and Qt, and a good number of other technologies and frameworks.

After getting a 14.4kbps modem in ~1995 and experiencing the magic of Unix via a dial-up connection, I was decided on it. I started using GNU/Linux a significant percentage of time in 1998 and exclusively as the only OS for desktops and servers in 2001, standardizing on Debian GNU and derivative distributions.

Some of my earliest documented adventures with Unix included translating the famous John Kirch’s 1998 paper “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX” to another language, and 1999 co-authoring a custom GNU/Linux distribution called lt1 that fit in 1.44MB of space (the size of a diskette) for diskless PC terminals.

To date I have accumulated 25+ years of professional experience using, programming, managing, and documenting Unix and Unix-like systems on and off the Internet. I have worked on a number of software projects while holding volunteering, development, consulting, architecting, and/or management roles.