In hindsight, it is somewhat peculiar that I spent a considerable timeusing Fedora 11 with a broken Flash setup instead of seriously lookinginto the situation. What happened is that I made a simple assumption: Iassumed that Flash and the associated infrastructure needed to run it ona 64-bit machine were second class citizens, looked down on and basicallyunsupported.

If I'd assumed that Fedora wouldn't leave Flash broken on 64-bitmachines, then it being broken on my machine was clearly

Every so often I discover some exceptional piece of braindamage inSolaris. Here is one of them, presented in handy illustrated form:

$ cat cdtest#!/bin/shcd /not/there || echo failedecho got here$ sh cdtest./cdtest: /not/there: does not exist

(No other output is produced.)

Oh yes, Solaris. Killing my script when a cd fails is just whatI want you to do, especially when this behavior is undocumented andcannot be turned

Sometimes I'm slow; only recently did it occur to me how the $LANG sort misfeature and GNU comm's misfeature combine in an orgy of annoyance in a heterogenousenvironment.

Suppose that you have systems that changed their default localebetween operating system versions. As part of routine processing , you use comm to get the difference betweensomething on the local system and a global list. Well, oops. Even if youcarefully use sort on both versions, you are going to have problems.

As we saw earlier