Documentation is not free

Yes, system administrators should document things. At the same time,it's important to understand that documentation is not free; it has acost. Since documentation does not appear from thin air in zero time,producing it costs people's time.

(And this doesn't even count testing it afterward .)

Unless your sysadmins don't have enough to do (which is a ratherrare occurrence around here), this means that documentation costsreal dollars. If you want to do everything you currently


Weekly spam summary on August 26th, 2006

Unfortunately, the SMTP listener was terminated for some reason Fridayat 1pm, so some of the weekly stats are going to be way off. But havingsaid that, there are some alarming numbers this week:

  • got 12,863 messages from 215 different IP addresses.
  • handled 19,196 sessions from 1,271 different IP addresses.
  • received 201,196 connections from at least 9,670 different IPaddresses since Friday at 1pm

先生唔係嘛?

昨天跟攝影伙伴小聚閒聊,他說早前有單 job 找他問價錢,工作性質是拍攝相片。

大概是幫餐廳拍攝的,問價的人問﹕「可唔可以拍攝費一半用餐券代替呢 ?

聽到都笑死的,那麼唔知可唔可以在月頭交租時跟業主講﹕「可唔可以


Please don't use session cookies

Recently I have become quite irritated at a couple of websites that Ivisit regularly. See, they have a membership system, and I'm a dulypaid member (I like them and it has some benefits (that I rarely use)),and they recently switched to using session cookies for logins. Whichmeans that every day when I visit, I get to make a time-wasting detourthrough their login page.

It's tempting to think that if you use session cookies, the users are'


Another stupid spider mistake

To follow up my earlier entry on this stuff,I just saw another stunned monkey moment :

  • you can't randomly add a trailing slash to URLs any more thanyou can randomly remove them.
  • especially when the URL includes a query parameter, because thenyou're changing the query. And that always works really well.

From the pattern of the stealth spider's requests, I think it is addingthe trailing slash on any URL that doesn't end in a filename with anextension. This is stunningly


More on the Solaris ssh stuff (part 3)

As an update on the Solaris ssh stuff and to sortof answer a question left in comments on here :

I brought another Solaris machine up to the current patchlevels today,which let me see what the current state of affairs is. The best answeris that it's confusing and not fixed yet.

  • patch 112908-24 and 112908-25, the apparently bad versions of the'krb5 shared obj' patch, have been very thoroughly removed.

How not to get our business

From email sent to the University of Toronto's InterNIC WHOIS contactemail address recently, from one vals@capris.com:

Good evening,

Our site monitoring software has alerted us that someone from yourorganization was doing a search on Google.ca for "Toronto collocation"and you visited our site, [deleted].

I was just wondering if your search was successful and if we can helpyou with your current or future hosting or collocation needs?

[...]

Val Slastnikov
Director, Strategic Alliances

The


20060824網摘 – Google Base data api

變成「周摘」了,其實可以分開幾天來貼。不過事忙,越積越多~~

Google


Why I am irritated with evince

Evince is in general a nicePDF viewer (technically it supports other formats too), much nicer andfar less irritating than Adobe Acrobat. (For a start, evince actuallyquits when I click on the 'close window' button; Adobe Acrobat presumesthat I wanted it to clear the current document.)

The problems come in when I tried to do something besides view adocument. (Perhaps evince was jealous that I wasn't satisfiedwith it.)

First, evince silently aborts printing if I have it


An update on impending changes to access to Solaris patches

To update my earlier reporting , here'sthe current state, again as reported on the pca news page .

The new Sun access restrictions only apply to Solaris 10 (andanything Sun releases later). For Solaris 9 and earlier, Sun isn'tmaking any changes for patch access; anonymous access via pca continues to work. (I waswondering about that, since I have been too busy to get around togetting a Sun Online Account, yet my patch access was still fine.)

Since all