Sometimes I write little scripts partly in order toplay around with a command I haven't used before. Such is the case withtoday's script, which I have unimaginatively called bsearch-nums . Hereit is:

#!/bin/sh# usage: bsearch-nums START ENDlo=$1; hi=$2while [ $lo -lt $hi ]; do  mid=`echo $lo $hi +2/p | dc`  echo "try: $mid"

In the traditional illustrated form:

; metastat fs5/d40
metastat: sandiego.cs: fs5: set name is inconsistent

Almost all DiskSuite commands that deal with disk sets will accept fsN/dN to specify the set and the disk at once, and metastat itselfproduces output in this form. But metastat refuses to accept it asinput; instead you have to use ' metastat -s fs5 d40 '.

This isn't just a cosmetic issue. The fsN/dNN format is

This week, we:

• got 15,266 messages from 269 different IP addresses.
• handled 22,009 sessions from 1,693 different IP addresses.
• received 897,934 connections from at least 48,417 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 10 connections being checked at once.

Just like last time , that is not a typo (andnothing on the system was affected enough to make me notice it beforenow,

I just got yet another prompt about certificate issues on the occasionof visiting yet another website (I think because it had a self-signedcertificate, but who can tell with Firefox's dialog about it?). And allthis reminded me of how badly implemented SSL is in web browsers.

There are three actual good things that can be done with SSL: encryptingthe conversation, stopping man in the middle attacks, and certifyingthat the website is in some sense trustworthy. The web SSL experienceis so bad