Jason Eckert's Website and Blog

If you’ve ever installed and explored another Linux distro (what Linux sysadmin hasn’t?!?)

On April 4th 1975, a small company called Microsoft was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The COVID-19 virus has forced colleges and universities in Canada to quickly move their stuff to an online format to allow classes to continue using social isolation.

The COVID-19 virus has forced colleges and universities in Ontario to quickly move their stuff to an online format to allow classes to continue using social isolation.

If you head over to My published books page, you’ll see that I’ve written a large number of textbooks over the years for different publishers, as well as worked as a technical editor for many other titles.

I’ve finally done it.

This year was flat-out awesome!

Most people will look at this 3-foot-long behemoth of ancient electronics and wonder why it wasn’t scrapped decades ago.

Over the past few years, I’ve taken to using technology less and less in my daily life.

Just under a year ago, I quit Facebook.

1.

While cleaning out a drawer last night, I came across my old, beloved Nokia N810 Internet appliance that I bought in early 2008.

The term open source has become a household term in software circles.

A friend of mine found himself working for a school in the mid 1990s, deploying a new lab of Apple Mac computers designed to teach graphic design.

This past week, MAD Magazine announced that, after 67 years, it would cease publication by the end of the year.

Earlier this week, I did a presentation for WWITPRO that detailed the UNIX philosophy and its relevance today.

In computing, GNU (which stands for “GNU’s Not UNIX”) started as a project led by Richard Stallman aimed to replace all of the components of the UNIX operating system with freely-developed versions.

Back in the early 1990s, teenagers with a drivers license made a hobby of tweaking out their cars - adding custom grills, spoilers, paint jobs, and so on.

A few weeks back I managed to pick up an incredibly rare laptop in immaculate condition for $50 on Kijiji: a Tadpole Technologies SPARCbook 3000ST from 1997 (it also came with two other working Pentium laptops from the 1990s).

Tonight I gave a presentation at the Kitchener-Waterloo Linux User’s Group (KWLUG) about Pop!

Two decades ago, a piece of open source software I wrote for a Canadian HPC project caught the attention of someone working for NASA JPL, and after a few emails and a call regarding our experience applying it, a modified version of it was used in a small…

A few weeks ago, I was out at a social event with a bunch of guys and gals from the local Linux/UNIX/developer/IT community (contrary to popular opinion, Linux/UNIX people know how to party hard).

35 years ago today, Apple announced their Macintosh computer.

1.

At the end of each year, I take some time to reflect on the previous year - it provides perspective, and is a lot of fun!

Last week, I gave a presentation at a local LUG (which is a Linux User’s Group, for anyone who hasn’t heard of those before) on the subject of SSH Foo.

These past few years, I’ve provided various types of support for some tech incubators in the Kitchener-Waterloo region where I live (it’s a complex arrangement that I won’t go into within this post, but mostly involves helping people with technology imple…

Open source software has had a powerful effect on computing.

Simply put, Git is a version control system that can be used to keep track of the changes that you make to files over time - it allows you to revert files to a previous state, or see who made changes to a file at different times if several people are work…

Last week, my friend Scott Elliott did a great guest presentation at the college where he talked about, amongst other things, devops.

IT professionals are often asked to describe technologies to others within their organization, and this includes buzz words they may have heard in some tech article or trade magazine: There’s definitely no shortage of these buzz words in the tech industry…

Halt and Catch Fire is an AMC television series that ran for four seasons from 2014-2017, and covers the culture and pivotal aspects of the computing industry from 1983 (just after the release of the IBM PC) to 1994 (when the Internet and World Wide Web e…

I actually started teaching on April 13th 1998 (20 years ago today).

One thing that has always annoyed me about the Internet surrounds the history and evolution of UNIX-based operating systems.

I took the picture at the top of this post sitting in Starbucks recently with my trusty, 12-year-old PowerBook G4 laptop from Apple.

Nearly everyone working in an Information Technology (IT) field has at least one IT-related certification.

So what happened in 2017?

The 80s and 90s was a period of intense development in the computer hardware and software worlds.

For those in the tech world, the title of this post may seem both radical and pretentious.

Intel and their x86 computing architecture have pretty much dominated the computing industry since the late 1980s.

Why on earth would anyone want to buy a video game the size of a refrigerator?!?

I grew up (and currently live) in the city of Cambridge in Ontario, Canada.

If you wanted a fast computer back in 1976, you bought the 5.5 ton, $9 million Cray-1 made by Cray Research.

This year marks Canada’s 150th anniversary (1867-2017), and while there are some cool events happening this year (e.g.

As you can see from the picture at the top of this post, last week BlackBerry’s smartphone market share fell to 0% in the global marketplace.

For the past years, I’ve done a “year in review” blog post, and of course this one is for 2016!

While most of my posts are pictures (funny pictures, persona pictures, memes, etc.), I’ve also got lots of funny text posts.

I specifically attended yesterday’s Fuzenation Technology & Music Summit in Kitchener, Ontario to hear Steve Wozniak (a.k.a.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Linux operating system!

On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created a post detailing his World Wide Web project on a newsgroup called alt.hypertext in order to entice others to collaborate with him and create and host Web pages for the World Wide Web.