I have to spend a fair bit of time at work hacking away on Solaris boxes and have really started to miss some of the extra features of many GNU tools I really took for granted. One that really bugs me is the lack of in-place editing in Solaris sed (-i using GNU sed). Perl to the rescuse!
perl -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g' /path/to/file
The above is pretty functionally equivalent to sed -i. A quick alias in .bashrc:
alias sed-i='perl -pi -e'
and everything in life is well again.

A true random number generator service has gone online courtesy of the Quantum Random Bit Generator Service developed at the Ruder Boškovic Institute in Croatia. The ‘Quantum Random Bit Generator’ at the heart of QRBGS is a fast non-deterministic random bit (number) generator whose randomness relies on intrinsic randomness of the quantum physical process of photonic emission in semiconductors and subsequent detection by photoelectric effect.

The service currently provides access via a stand alone CLI client as well as libraries for C/C++ and MATLAB plugins allowing users to request random bits in a number of data type such as int, long, float etc. This is excellent for application developers requiring high entropy randomness and is particularly useful for stuff such as cryptography and online gaming. It looks like access via a web service will be provided soon.

I’ve been learning Python recently, an open source dynamic object-orientated programming language, and stumbled upon Dive Into Python, a great book that is published freely under the GNU Free Documentation License. The book is available in a number of formats including pdf. If you already have some object-orientated programming experience and want to learn Python I’d recommend giving it a read.