Wandering Thoughts archives

Link: HTML Doctype declarations inventoried

Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration is pretty much summarized by its title. As a bonus, it includes a handy chart of how various browsers react to various specific DOCTYPE declarations (or did, as of when the chart was made; browser DOCTYPE behavior is an ever-changing target, and the chart is a good illustration of how much variety there can be).

(From Anne van Kesteren.)

Link: Warning Signs for Tomorrow

Warning Signs for Tomorrow is a collection of warning signs for tomorrow. Amusing and potentially useful ones (for me; your mileage may vary) include 'lack of internet connectivity', 'ubiquitous surveillance', and 'motivation hazard'.

(From James Nicoll.)

Link: IRON File Systems

IRON File Systems [PDF] is a paper from the 2005 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. To quote from the abstract:

Commodity file systems trust disks to either work or fail completely, yet modern disks exhibit more complex failure modes. We suggest a new fail-partial failure model for disks, which incorporates realistic localized faults such as latent sector errors and block corruption. We then develop and apply a novel failure-policy fingerprinting framework, to investigate how commodity file systems react to a range of more realistic disk failures. [...]

They did their primary analysis on Linux ext3, ReiserFS 3, and (Linux) JFS; the results are comprehensive, interesting, and sometimes scary.

Link: The Single Unix Specification et al

The Open Group Base Specification Issue 6 is, well, to quote it:

This standard is the single common revision to IEEE Std 1003.1-1996, IEEE Std 1003.2-1992, and the Base Specifications of The Open Group Single UNIX Specification, Version 2.

(Those IEEE standards are better known as 'POSIX'.)

The Single Unix Specification (SUS) is a very useful authoritative reference for how various things should behave in theory. (How they behave in fact is a different issue; not everything is correctly implemented, and not everything is SUS/POSIX compliant to start with.)

You'd think that the Open Group would make this stuff openly available, but instead they want you to register and provide them with various personal details. As we can see here, that is not strictly speaking necessary; you just need the right magic URL.

(From Andree Leidenfrost via Debian Planet.)

Link: Csh Programming Considered Harmful

Tom Christiansen's Csh Programming Considered Harmful used to be posted to various Usenet comp.unix groups, nigh on ten years ago or so. I consider it sort of a pity that it isn't still being posted, because every so often someone still decides that writing shell scripts in csh would be a good idea.

Some of the problems Christiansen identified have since been fixed by modern versions of tcsh, but not all of them.

(The article can also serve as an interesting catalog of sh programming tricks.)