Welcome to my blog
Welcome to my blog. This blog will be about Splunk, Linux Security and Data Visualization. The first posts will be mainly about Splunk. I will cover how to install Splunk on Linux which is free, and how to get a developer license which will allow you to index more data per day. When you install Splunk you will get a free enterprise license for 60 days which will then turn into a basic Splunk free license thereafter. This license will always be free, but it has limitations on it as far as how much data you can index, and certain functionalities are turned off. More about that later.
You can get a free 6 month Splunk Developer license which is easy to apply for, and I will write a blog post about how to do that. There will also be a Splunk resources page which will give you links to free tutorials on Splunk and other courses I recommend. I am not paid anything by anybody for recommending a course or book. I’ll just recommend them because they are good and I’ll tell you why they’re good.
I will also tell you how to install R and R Studio, both of which are free. R is written and maintained by two men out of New Zealand, and it can handle huge datasets and is well worth learning. R has an incredible number of packages and the ggplot2 and Plotly packages are incredible graphics and plotting programs. I will also explain things like what a naive Bayesian analysis is and how to use it in machine learning. It is called a naive Bayesian analysis for a reason as well, but as long as you understand its limitations it can be quite useful.
I’ve been using Linux since 2013 after I dual booted a Windows computer with Ubuntu 13.10. Fast forward to 2019 and every computer in our house now has a Linux operating system. Linux is a lot easier to use than you might think, it has tons of powerful free programs, and the linux forums mean that you are never stuck for an answer to a problem. Certain programs work better on Linux than on Windows – for example Windows has a problem with rendition of graphs in R programming that just does not exist when you run R on Linux. That’s extremely important if you want to include a graph from R or R Studio in a report to your company Vice Presidents. Linux Mint is now the 4th most popular operating system in the world. Microsoft Windows is first, the Google Chrome operating system is second and Apple is third. The Google Chrome operating system currently sits on top of a Linux Gentoo operating system – Gentoo runs very fast and is the main reason a chromebook can boot up in 6 seconds. If you have an old laptop sitting around then it is worth installing a Linux operating system on it and playing around with it. It’s a good way for you or your children to learn a lot more about programming. In a future blog post I will cover how to create a live boot usb stick and how to install a Linux operating system on a computer you don’t use anymore.
A few months ago I installed the Julia Programming language on my Linux desktop and one of my Linux netbooks. Julia is a new programming language which is very fast and in some cases Julia can run 43 times faster than Python – this is not true all the time, it depends on the code and what it is doing. Sergey Brin one of the two founders of Google has a saying “Python where we can, C++ where we have to”. Many programs are written originally in Python and then selected parts of them are rewritten in C++ to speed them up. Julia is only 6% slower than C++ and it was developed with the aim of being a one stop program that can be used straight out of the box without having to rewrite parts of the program in a different language. This means that new software can be brought to market faster without time spent on rewrites of part of the program in C++. That is not the main direction of this website, which is Splunk, Linux Security and Data Visualization but it is a subject I’d like to cover and experiment with at some point. I have a program which takes somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds to run in Python on my Linux desktop. I will rewrite the same program in Julia and time both of them just to what the time difference is.
I’m interested in hearing from you so please contact me on the contact page. I am building this website myself using a free Udemy course. Many thanks to Martie Dread from Northern Ireland for creating this course. Tell me what you like about the website, what you’d like to see differently, and anything you’d like me to cover and I’ll research it and write a blog about it. I still have a Windows computer which is dual booted with Linux – I tend to install all new types of software on Linux unless for some reason it works better on Windows. I have noticed many Udemy courses have the instructions to install their type of software on Windows and on Apple, but some of them skip how to install the software on Linux. If you are a Udemy instructor and you don’t know how to install the software you are writing about on Linux then feel free to email me and I’ll be happy to help you if I can. If you do that then include a link to the download page for the software, the link to the Wikipedia page for the software, and tell me a little about what the software is for.
I created an extra Twitter account specifically for this website. Many thanks to Amit Agarwal for writing a blog on how to point two Twitter accounts to the same gmail address. In case you’re wondering how to do this, if you have a gmail account then JoeSmith at gmail and JoeSmith at googlemail will both end up at the main JoeSmith at gmail account. That’s worth knowing.
Have a great day everyone.
Mike Ward