[Leaplist] Putting my time where my mouth is, give me the applications you use -- WAS: Free alternatives

[Jason Boxman]

Steve Litt wrote:
<snip>
> 
> Like I say -- these are all one-offs that appeal to nobody else, but everyone 
> has their own one-offs. I find time and time again, my one-offs are 
> constructed from the same usual suspects: Umenu, VimOutliner, awk, sed, ruby, 
> tr, cut, grep Postgres/psql, latex, tex, wc, bash and the like. No listing of 
> apps would be complete without a list of known, tested components with which 
> to quickly assemble your own apps.

I take the opposite approach and maximize my use of OTS Open Source (tm) 
software.  I rarely, almost never, write any custom software to 
accomplish tasks, because it becomes necessary to then maintain it.

The only thing that comes to mind, though I didn't even write it, is a 
short script run from cron every night that prunes mailing lists posts 
older than 30 days that have been read.  Actually it's a one-liner with 
find, xargs, and rm.

More than five years ago I had something to cache Debian packages, but 
before I had it in a working state I was happy with, apt-proxy v2 
replaced it.  Probably the only instance where I spent time writing 
software for something I couldn't easily do with freely available Open 
Source (tm) stuff at the time.

Oh, I wrote polltc[1] to grab the Linux traffic control counters for 
graphing in the most rudimentary way possible.  If I knew C, I could get 
into the counters directly and poll more frequently and accurately, but 
it was good enough.  Works with Munin, too.  (Wasn't important enough to 
  read the C book I had.)

Honestly can't think of another thing...

[1] http://blog.edseek.com/archives/2006/03/07/polltc-104-pushed/

I spend the time documenting how to configure Open Source (tm) to do 
stuff I want instead, I guess.


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.