Baking the line of tools

Where to draw the line between Nukom capabilities and the
3rd party and Windows/UNIX/Linux internal tools' mechanisms? There are thousands
and thousands of helper programs available for each of these operating systems.

NUKOM system helps supporting decisions and cost cutting, in good ITIL tradition.

Wishlish
- ticket database and workflow (first console based)
- downtime cause analysis
- A: license transition warnings (when user counts soon exceeded)
- taking account the delivery times of components in different
environments

Intelligence
- the nukom helps a system admin by containing a database of
information technology equipment, and knowing their
compatibility (to an extent)
- often knowledge is passed as verbal communications from
admin to admin in Web-based discussion threads, but
the risk there is:

a) misunderstanding the advice
b) there's often a significant cost factor due to searching
c) the quality of advice is related to the quality of
the "situation description" that the admin can provide
- this description is part of data security also, so
the company is exposing its details out to a large
audience




Some
are meant to help in housekeeping chores to the operating
system humming, clean, optimized. These are very useful, but
the pay for these might add up to say 200 x $15 or
$3000 for an administrator.

That is quite a lot of dough

in addition to the 200-400 price tag on Windows itself.

Often admins do not know this beforehand. They buy an operating
system based on the features and promises made in brochures, which
fail to mention that there's more to it that you need to spend
to get a good system.

Interpreter in spotlight! New features; predictors and tweet

Modules to be found in the interpreter itself:

A shell is as powerful as its capabilities plus the understanding of
those by human user. This shell will be one that does not lack
in features. But I also like to make many migration paths available
into the core of the shell, so newbies learn it fast in practical
business use. Thus sandboxing, safety indicators, and other means
are necessary.

- future predictor shows what side effects a command has
- disk space predictor shows how much impact a command has on disk or other media
- change propagation simulator shows when your commands hit networked hosts
good for admins running remote thingies
- mutator can be used as pipe to make rainbow commands
- dictionaries available from many languages
- irc module inbolt into the system
- tweet supported from command line; like 'tw hi guys [profile]'
- helpdesk chats, asking help from gurus 'open-chat peterW'
- more coming up!

Latest on Nukom

It's been wonderful summer here in Finland. I've taken up training and it really
elevates the mood. Time spent in front of the monitor has slightly, but just slightly decreased. It doesn't mean that Nukom would be in ice. I have a lot of ideas with it. One of those is that currently, if we think of the workflow, at least my point of view is that there's too much time wasted on context swaps; we are going from one application to the other; starting big programs, which are only getting bigger and bigger (the 'bloat'). So a shell would essentially make things flow in a smoother way. Just like in the Unix world, where admins like to tinker on automation, I'd like to bring strong automation tools to Windows world.

Lately..

http://jsw.ovine.net/

:-)

Nukom goals

Nukom is a project where I want to make a new kind of effective
shell for Windows. Why Windows? Because it lacks a good tool for this. I have used 4DOS back in the days of 1990s, and I really liked the power of typing commands and getting the operating system do things real fast. Nowadays, the Windows has gotten a bit more cloggy. And the word 'bit' is an understatement. I want speed, and versatility.

Besides writing a shell is very good practise. With it, you get to do a lot of things:

First, thinking what the OS lacks. What needs to be done?

How to interpret commands from a user.

How to modularize the code of a shell, ie. what kind of mechanisms, loops, conditions, and so on can be done as to not grow the code size or program complexity. This is the Art of Programming.
Elegant code is always quite pleasant to maintain.