Wandering Thoughts archives

2006-12-31: A (Solaris 8) automounter irritation
2006-12-30: Weekly spam summary on December 30th, 2006
2006-12-29: What can go wrong if your compiler is not thread aware
2006-12-28: A thought on the advance of X auto-configuration
2006-12-27: Solaris 8 DiskSuite's lack of good monitoring
HTTP as it is seen in the wild
2006-12-26: Link: OpenBSD spamd
Link: varnish, a HTTP accelerator
2006-12-25: The problem with #ifdef
A thought of the day
Link: A lovely summary of the XHTML issue
2006-12-24: What Google Sitemaps isn't
2006-12-23: Weekly spam summary on December 23rd, 2006
2006-12-22: Another example of why Bourne shell quoting makes me grumpy
2006-12-21: Something to avoid in callback email address verification
2006-12-20: How many root DNS servers are reachable over Internet II?
2006-12-19: An Internet dependency
2006-12-18: A basic principle of website security
2006-12-17: How to get me to block your web ads in a flash
Weekly spam summary on December 16th, 2006
2006-12-15: An unsurprising discovery about spammer behavior
2006-12-14: Fedora Core's memory problem
2006-12-13: An example of Unix's slow fossilization
A SMTP implementor's conundrum
2006-12-12: A limitation of OpenBSD bridging NAT firewalls
2006-12-10: An irony of web serving
Weekly spam summary on December 9th, 2006
2006-12-09: How DWiki uses partial function evaluation
2006-12-08: What I want out of a Linux partitioning program
Why I don't expect result-oriented work hours to work out
2006-12-07: Another obnoxious discovery about Ubuntu's /var/run stuff
How not to set up your DNS (part 13)
2006-12-06: Setting up switches to avoid unwanted VLAN leakage
2006-12-05: A small annoyance with Unix wildcards
2006-12-04: How SSH achieves forward secrecy
2006-12-03: More fun with Python's indentation rules
2006-12-02: Weekly spam summary on December 2nd, 2006
2006-12-01: Ubuntu's attention to detail in init.d scripts
2006-11-30: How Python parses indentation
2006-11-29: Turning off HTTP basic authentication in urllib
2006-11-28: Progress towards an all 64-bit application world
2006-11-27: Some words of wisdom on email certification programs
Why I don't rip my CDs
2006-11-26: An irritating X Windows limitation with wheel mice
Link: Serif vs. Sans Serif Legibility
Weekly spam summary on November 25th, 2006
2006-11-25: The quest for a nice Linux CD player application
2006-11-24: A classical Unix tape gotcha
2006-11-23: Why I don't file bug reports very often
2006-11-22: Why ssh validates host keys using the exact name you supplied
2006-11-21: A small script: bsearch-nums
2006-11-20: A DiskSuite annoyance: metastat
2006-11-19: How https: should work
Weekly spam summary on November 18th, 2006
2006-11-18: Link: Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces
Should you care about whether you can upgrade hardware?
The good old days of Unix
2006-11-17: How to quiesce NFS traffic the brute force way
2006-11-16: An annoying omission in the Solaris 8 DiskSuite toolset
2006-11-15: A little regexp thing to remember about \b (and \w)
Why the Bourne shell is not my favorite language
2006-11-14: Some more power consumption numbers
2006-11-13: People aren't suspicious
2006-11-12: Some ways to break your syndication feed
Broken syndication feeds are worse than no feed
2006-11-11: Weekly spam summary on November 11th, 2006
A thought about disaster recovery planning
2006-11-10: Link: On Bots
2006-11-09: A fundamental problem with challenge/response anti-spam systems
The importance of printable objects
2006-11-08: Link: Pumas on Hoverbikes
The quest for the mythical C.UTF-8 locale
2006-11-07: Link: Unicode Spaces
2006-11-06: HTML character sets
2006-11-05: An interesting Python garbage collection bug
2006-11-04: Weekly spam summary on November 4th, 2006
2006-11-03: Installing Wine on Fedora Core 5 x86_64
2006-11-02: Knowing things versus being able to prove them
2006-11-01: The downsides of remailing
2006-10-31: A Solaris 8 make bug
An Internet rule of thumb
2006-10-30: A brief Exim observation
First irritations with Fedora Core 6
2006-10-29: Python's assert is a weak debugging tool
2006-10-28: Weekly spam summary on October 28th, 2006
2006-10-27: In (modest) praise of Solaris DiskSuite
2006-10-26: Languages need comments
2006-10-25: Another advantage of distributed version control systems
2006-10-24: Google and YouTube
2006-10-23: A dump performance hint: the block size really matters
2006-10-22: Why cursors blink
2006-10-21: Weekly spam summary on October 21st, 2006
An irritating iptables limitation
2006-10-20: Why releases are important
2006-10-19: A paradox of ignorance
An Ubuntu astonishment
2006-10-18: CSS is assembly language
Getting your spam crossed
2006-10-17: Link: HTML Doctype declarations inventoried
An Amanda gotcha with dumps to disk
2006-10-16: Why have an MX record to yourself?
2006-10-15: On the various meanings of <tag />
2006-10-14: Weekly spam summary on October 14, 2006
2006-10-13: Why quoting in the Bourne shell makes me grumpy
Link: Warning Signs for Tomorrow
2006-10-12: How stable my AMD 64-bit systems have been
2006-10-11: Getting nice looking TrueType fonts on Fedora Core
A spectacular web spammer failure
2006-10-10: Cross building i386 RPMs on an x86_64 Fedora Core 5 machine
A trivial script: wcat
2006-10-09: I ♥ Fedora Extras
2006-10-08: A reason to read blogs in reverse chronological order
2006-10-07: Weekly spam summary on October 7th, 2006
2006-10-06: A Python quoting irritation
2006-10-05: Thoughts on machine identity
2006-10-04: A pyramid of little scripts: nsdig
2006-10-03: Some numbers for modern disk performance
2006-10-02: The longevity of old hardware
2006-10-01: The advantage of vendor packages
2006-09-30: Weekly spam summary on September 30th, 2006
2006-09-29: Gnome daemons you'll want to run in a custom environment
2006-09-28: Why I hate $LANG and locales on Unix
2006-09-27: How not to set up your DNS (part 12)
2006-09-26: Why people still like TCL/TK
Web site security theatre
2006-09-25: Some reactions to a dual monitor X setup
2006-09-24: Two approaches to Unix environments
Weekly spam summary on September 23rd, 2006
2006-09-22: A NFS mount accident on Linux
2006-09-21: The danger of relying on Javascript for input validation
An amusingly truthful hostname
2006-09-20: A peculiarity of hardware at universities
2006-09-19: One of the reasons I dislike SELinux
2006-09-18: Why /var/log/btmp may be using up a lot of space in your /var
My current view of Linux system filesystem sizes
2006-09-17: How to convert a time string in GMT to seconds since the epoch
2006-09-16: Weekly spam summary on September 16th, 2006
2006-09-15: The temptation of LVM
2006-09-14: A bonus to writing documentation
The brute-force way to install missing Solaris 9 packages
2006-09-13: The really irritating thing about voicemail
2006-09-12: A quick note about how extended partitions work
2006-09-11: Python's extra-clever help() function
'In place' filesystem defragmentation with Disksuite
2006-09-10: A thought on iTunes and similar online services
Weekly spam summary on September 9th, 2006
2006-09-09: Something I really wish vendor product pages did
2006-09-08: A Solaris 8 Disksuite single user mode surprise
I hate hardware (AMD CPU edition)
Link: IRON File Systems
2006-09-07: Industrial strength Python
Some wise words from Henry Spencer on backups
2006-09-06: How fast an LCD refresh rate is going to be fast enough?
2006-09-05: Stupid web spammer tricks
2006-09-04: A thought about interactive development environments
2006-09-03: Why writing documentation is no fun
2006-09-02: Weekly spam summary on September 2nd, 2006
2006-09-01: Link: The Single Unix Specification et al
Why Postfix is not my favorite mailer
2006-08-31: SIGCHLD versus Python: a problem of semantics
How dd does blocking
2006-08-30: A problem with debugging threaded Python programs
How to lose readers of your syndication feed
2006-08-29: An interesting filesystem corruption problem
Documentation should be cheap
2006-08-27: Documentation is not free
2006-08-26: Weekly spam summary on August 26th, 2006
2006-08-25: Please don't use session cookies
Another stupid spider mistake
2006-08-24: More on the Solaris ssh stuff (part 3)
How not to get our business
2006-08-23: Why I am irritated with evince
An update on impending changes to access to Solaris patches
2006-08-22: How not to set up your DNS (part 11)
Link: Csh Programming Considered Harmful
fork(), wait(), and threads
2006-08-21: Most new products are upgrades
How not to set up your DNS (part 10)
2006-08-20: Finally, a good reason to periodically reboot servers
2006-08-19: Weekly spam summary on August 29th, 2006
Documentation needs testing
2006-08-18: Why apt-get is not my favorite application (part 2)
2006-08-17: Idealist versus Realist
The quick secret to bootable USB keys
2006-08-16: The fun of 32-bit bugs
2006-08-15: Hardware RAID versus software RAID
2006-08-14: The importance of numerical literacy
Distributions: keep your hands off vi
2006-08-13: The real Bourne shell problem
2006-08-12: Weekly spam summary on August 12th, 2006
2006-08-11: An unhappy spam milestone
2006-08-10: A Bourne shell gotcha: redirection order
2006-08-09: A Bourne shell irritation
2006-08-08: Slashdot's tacit admission of failure
2006-08-07: A problem in Python's implementation of closures
2006-08-06: A fun little regular expression bug
2006-08-05: Weekly spam summary on August 5th, 2006
2006-08-04: My current set of Firefox extensions
2006-08-03: Link: When the "best tool for the job"... isn't.
How to irritate your successor (on Solaris)
2006-08-02: In praise of installing from Live CDs
2006-08-01: One serial problem I should remember
2006-07-31: The limitations of Unix atime
2006-07-30: XHTML on the web is for masochists
Weekly spam summary on July 29th, 2006
2006-07-29: Link: Ten Risks of PKI
Another little sysadmin twitch or two
2006-07-28: A plug for blastwave.org
2006-07-27: Unix files do not have creation times
2006-07-26: xterm's ziconbeep feature
2006-07-25: An awk idiom: getting fields backwards from the end of the line
Reading Unix manpages
2006-07-24: Link: Linguistic blindness illustrated
A brief history of cut and paste in X
Walking away from Slashdot: a story of design
2006-07-23: Weekly spam summary on July 22nd, 2006
2006-07-22: Solaris's sparseness
2006-07-21: What Linux distributions we use (and sort of why)
2006-07-20: Why I like Python more than Perl
Link: non-errors in English
2006-07-19: A sysadmin habit: screen locking
Using Python to test system behavior
Link: 'Document Centric'
2006-07-18: Why you can't mix wildcard IP port binding with other bindings
2006-07-17: Thesis: SMP is a failure for most Internet servers
2006-07-16: Weekly spam summary on July 15th, 2006
2006-07-15: A robot wish
2006-07-14: SELinux bites man: a story
Pointers to some SELinux explanations
2006-07-13: A thought on Linux installation versus Solaris 9 installation
2006-07-12: Why I like 'lib64' better than 'lib32' for the x86_64 transition
2006-07-11: Why nofollow is useful and important
2006-07-10: A suggestion for people with 'Out of Office' autoreplies
2006-07-09: Weekly spam summary on July 8th, 2006
2006-07-08: The problem of IT winning arguments
2006-07-07: Sysadmins are an overhead
2006-07-06: More on tabs
2006-07-05: On tabs
2006-07-04: A surprise with using object() instances
2006-07-03: Why Solaris is not my favorite operating system
2006-07-02: Weekly spam summary on July 1st, 2006
2006-07-01: Link: The virtual furniture police
Another annoying RSS feed trick
2006-06-30: Some thoughts on the Fedora Core 5 Gnome desktop
2006-06-29: screen -x
2006-06-28: The problem with cool URLs
2006-06-27: More on the Solaris ssh stuff (part 2)
Microsoft has a problem
2006-06-26: How not to report spam (part 1)
WSGI versus asynchronous servers
2006-06-25: Weekly spam summary on June 24th, 2006
2006-06-24: A problem with signals in Python
2006-06-23: Respecting Unix signals
2006-06-22: An extreme example of C preprocessor (ab)use
2006-06-21: A year (and a bit) of WanderingThoughts
More on the Solaris ssh stuff
2006-06-20: How to improve programming productivity
2006-06-19: Impending changes to access to Solaris patches
An odd choice of hostname
WSGI: the good and the bad
2006-06-18: Weekly spam summary on June 17th, 2006
2006-06-17: Metrics considered dangerous
2006-06-16: /etc/inittab versus /etc/rc.d
2006-06-15: How to have your web spider irritate me intensely
Dispelling a nightmare (a sysadmin tale)
2006-06-14: How to supply an IP address in Red Hat's Kickstart
2006-06-13: A web validation aphorism
2006-06-12: Why charging for things is deadly at a university
2006-06-11: Link: The Unix Heritage Society
Weekly spam summary on June 10th, 2006
2006-06-10: Fixing the bad Solaris ssh patch
2006-06-09: Seeing Quicktime movie trailers on Fedora Core 5
2006-06-08: Some computer power consumption numbers
2006-06-07: Some Fedora Core 5 experimentation
2006-06-06: Internet Distance (In Memoriam)
2006-06-05: A Python coding mistake
People are ordinary
2006-06-04: Weekly spam summary on June 3rd, 2006
2006-06-03: The fundamental problem of spam
2006-06-02: An object identity gotcha in Python
2006-06-01: Link: a Unix sysadmin rosetta stone
The cynical take on nofollow
2006-05-31: A simple way to get a disk space usage summary
Fiddling with X selections from shell scripts
2006-05-30: An shell script idiom for choosing what file to operate on
2006-05-29: An obvious way to do bulk initialization of dictionaries
2006-05-28: Weekly spam summary on May 27th, 2006
2006-05-27: Today's dilemma: wiki page or blog entry?
2006-05-26: A message you do not want to see from your backup software
The problem with treating RAID arrays as single disks
2006-05-25: Link: Classic Mistakes Enumerated
A Linux su surprise
SCGI is a form of caching
2006-05-24: The not so secret history of vmlinuz
2006-05-23: Link: Why overtime is bad for everyone
A defense of Unix that always irritates me
2006-05-22: A little failsafe feature in 3-prong electrical plugs
2006-05-21: My mistake with the Host: HTTP header
Weekly spam summary on May 20th, 2006
2006-05-20: Things that irritate me about Python's socket module
2006-05-19: Some modest suggestions on vendor tradeshow giveaways
2006-05-18: The future of spam is advance fee fraud
2006-05-17: Where to find package inventories on Solaris 9
2006-05-16: A Python limit I never expected to run into
2006-05-15: PlanetLab hammers on robots.txt
2006-05-14: Absolute versus relative URLs in syndication feeds
Link: an engineering management hack
A small user interface suggestion
Weekly spam summary on May 13th, 2006
2006-05-13: Safely updating Unix files
2006-05-12: The problem with preforking Python network servers
2006-05-11: Building a boot floppy for BIOS flashing
2006-05-10: Another really stupid web spider
The practical cost of forking in Python
2006-05-09: Bad patch management at Sun
2006-05-08: Link: an excerpt from On Writing Well
A really stupid web spider
2006-05-07: Link: Search engine page size limits for indexing
SCGI versus FastCGI
Weekly spam summary on May 6th, 2006
2006-05-06: Using a stock kernel.org kernel on Fedora Core 5
2006-05-05: Link: Readable colour text combinations
Peeking under mount points with NFS
2006-05-04: A subtle advantage of simple wikis
2006-05-03: Fedora Core 5's missing 32-bit shared library symlinks
2006-05-02: CSS and syndication (another CSS limitation)
2006-05-01: Emergency repairs with GRUB
2006-04-30: Weekly spam summary on April 29th, 2006
2006-04-29: Another little script: field
2006-04-28: Some first impressions of Fedora Core 5
2006-04-27: A picture of what university IT is like
2006-04-26: Common web spider mistakes
2006-04-25: Linux's %iowait statistic
2006-04-24: People are social
2006-04-23: The sort of command line I can wind up typing
Some CBL stats for the week ending on April 22nd, 2006
Weekly spam summary on April 22nd, 2006
2006-04-22: Link: Scaling Apache at ftp.heanet.ie
2006-04-21: Working on RPMs with quilt: an illustrated guide
A CSS limitation: it's not supported by lynx
2006-04-20: The spread of syndication
2006-04-19: A gotcha with analyzing syslog logs
2006-04-18: How Solaris matches names in NFS exports
2006-04-17: What do variable names mean (in Python and elsewhere)?
2006-04-16: Weekly spam summary on April 15th, 2006
2006-04-15: The problem of the growth of syndication feeds
Public interfaces and Solaris 9 patchadd exit codes
2006-04-14: Why del has to be a Python builtin
2006-04-13: An obnoxious RSS feed trick
2006-04-12: Something to remember about networking restarts
2006-04-11: A little script: howmany
2006-04-10: xiostat: better Linux disk IO statistics
The fun and charm of quoting URLs properly
2006-04-09: Weekly spam summary on April 8th, 2006
2006-04-08: Apple joins the webmail hall of shame
A common socket programming mistake: not handling short IO
2006-04-07: A bash irritation
A pleasing Python regularity with __future__
Some quick SMTP connection statistics
2006-04-06: Some things about smpatch
2006-04-05: Keeping up with new Python features
The other dynamic linking tax
2006-04-04: Why I don't like resorting to caching
2006-04-03: An ugly spam attempt
Spiders should respect rel="nofollow"
2006-04-02: Weekly spam summary on April 1st, 2006
2006-04-01: The best April Fools joke I've seen here
A Firefox CSS irritation
2006-03-31: The perfection trap: a lesson drawn from Worse is Better
The difficulty of punishing people at universities
2006-03-30: What disk IO stats you get from the Linux kernel
2006-03-29: Easier Solaris patch management with pca
2006-03-28: Hotmail spam stats revised
Using threading to implement a 'busy' cursor (a tale from long ago)
2006-03-27: A helpful Apache safety tip
2006-03-26: Weekly spam summary on March 25th, 2006
2006-03-25: A little gotcha with os.path.join
2006-03-24: Setting up to build RPMs
2006-03-23: Side effects are bad: a personal illustration
We apologize for the disruption in syndication feeds
Atom versus RSS
Solaris patch exit codes and what they mean
2006-03-22: Google Desktop and conditional GET (part 2)
2006-03-21: The backend for our recent mirroring
2006-03-20: An optimization thought
2006-03-19: Weekly spam summary on March 18th, 2006
2006-03-18: Some little things Firefox gets right
2006-03-17: How not to set up your DNS (part 9)
The problem with LiveJournal
2006-03-16: A tricky memoization decorator
2006-03-15: The aftermath of our mirroring
2006-03-14: Some problems with iostat on Linux
2006-03-13: Preparing a high load web mirror setup
2006-03-12: A DNS realization
Weekly spam summary on March 11th, 2006
2006-03-11: Web design trends that I don't understand (part 1)
2006-03-10: Why dynamic linking
The dynamic linking tax on fork()
2006-03-09: Making things simple for busy webmasters
Closures versus classes for capturing state
2006-03-08: Thinking about project failures
2006-03-07: A modular approach to Apache configuration
2006-03-06: How not to set up your mail server (part 1)
A thought about Technorati
2006-03-05: Weekly spam summary on March 4th, 2006
2006-03-04: os.walk can be surprisingly slow
2006-03-03: Visualizing dynamic program flow
2006-03-02: A robots.txt surprise
The :; shell prompt trick
2006-03-01: Unicode is not simple
2006-02-28: Practical RAID-1 read balancing
A sad day for SGI: it's now a spammer
A web spider update: not actually Uptilt's web spider
A surprising effect of RAID-1 resynchronization
2006-02-27: Python's extra-clever function parameters
2006-02-26: Weekly spam summary on February 25th, 2006
The hassle of email (as compared to RSS)
2006-02-25: More clever (ab)use of and and or
A trick for handling mutable default arguments
2006-02-24: Wanted: RSS feeds for vendor software updates
2006-02-23: Checking systems with RPM verification (part 1)
2006-02-22: Peter Drucker on the Five Deadly Business Sins
2006-02-21: An annoyance with $PATH on Red Hat
2006-02-20: More on regular expression performance
2006-02-19: Irony in a Referer spammer
Weekly spam summary on February 18th, 2006
2006-02-18: Automation promotes action
Stupid web spider tricks
2006-02-17: Some regular expression performance surprises
2006-02-16: An interesting IDE to SATA migration problem
2006-02-15: Fun with control characters and the web
2006-02-14: An advantage of using a non-standard shell
2006-02-13: GNU bc for the birthday paradox
The problem with <pre>
2006-02-12: Weekly spam summary on February 11th, 2006
2006-02-11: The return of how to get your web spider banned
2006-02-10: The charm of Sun's Freeware collection
Session IDs and the Birthday Paradox
2006-02-09: Using the tempfile module to get temporary files
2006-02-08: The id attribute considered dangerous
2006-02-07: $PATH in Solaris
2006-02-06: The sysadmin's life
More on simple markup languages
2006-02-05: Weekly spam summary on February 4th, 2006
2006-02-04: Why simple markup languages make sense
2006-02-03: Van Jacobson illustrates the importance of cache effects
2006-02-02: The rise of wikiblogs
2006-02-01: A suggestion: read your own syndication feed
2006-01-31: Getting console messages in X
2006-01-30: An impending Debian derailment
2006-01-29: Weekly spam summary on January 28th, 2006
2006-01-28: A bad product name
2006-01-27: Pointer: The Unix-Haters Handbook
2006-01-26: A Unix annoyance
2006-01-25: Site navigation stuff goes on the right side
2006-01-24: A digression on spelling
2006-01-23: Why case independent filenames are a bad idea
2006-01-22: Weekly spam summary on January 21st, 2005
2006-01-21: Please have stable ids for your feed entries
2006-01-20: The limits of web spider tolerance
2006-01-19: A Python length gotcha
2006-01-18: A portability gotcha with accept()
2006-01-17: The economics of CPU performance
2006-01-16: Some words of wisdom for all ISPs
The danger of specific errno values
2006-01-15: How not to set up your DNS (part 8)
Weekly spam summary on January 14th, 2006
2006-01-14: Writing HTML considered harmful
2006-01-13: An unconventional reason for large RAID stripe sizes
2006-01-12: How not to set up your DNS (part 7)
On not logging things
2006-01-11: Recording attribute access and method calls
2006-01-10: The peculiar effects of grant funding at universities
2006-01-09: How Linux names network interfaces
2006-01-08: Weekly spam summary on January 7th, 2006
Towards assessing SORBS' false positive rate
2006-01-07: Some notes on Solaris 9's Sunscreen IP filtering package
2006-01-06: The old nameserver glue record hell
2006-01-05: Is concurrency 'hard'?
2006-01-04: Python synergies in list addressing
2006-01-03: In practice, there are multiple namespaces for URLs
2006-01-02: Universities are peculiar places
2006-01-01: Weekly spam summary on December 31st, 2005

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