Paul Sander's Essays

These are essays about various (mostly technical) topics that I have written.

Recommendation for Secure Shell Public Key Management: This essay describes a method to manage Secure Shell public keys that I think is easier than editing the authorized_keys file directly. It involves storing keys individual keys separately and employing a simple way to generate the authorized_keys file.
Improving Makefile Quality: Make is the original build tool in the standard Unix environment to coordinate the compilation of medium- to large-scale projects, and to perform other computations during a software build. It is regarded as a tool that is easy to learn but hard to master. Programs written in its language are notoriously prone to error and are difficult to debug. Typical errors include rebuilding artifacts that are already up to date, or failing to build artifacts that are out of date, or to build artifacts in an unexpected order (thus producing incorrect build results). This paper identifies several sources of these errors, and provides solutions to correct these errors, using a version of Make that implements pattern rules (such as those provided in Gnu Make).

Paul Sander / Home Page / paul@wakawaka.com