I spent today building some of the infrastructure that will hopefullylet us safely Kickstart-install Fedora Core 4 on the new generationof SATA-based PC workstations. (Safely, because destroying a serverby accidentally starting a Kickstart install on it is one of my quietnightmares.)

What makes this difficult is a a simple decision, by itself sane andrational: the Linux kernel people decided that rather than making up anew set of block devices for things like USB memory sticks or SATAdisks, they would just reuse

So there I was the other day ,with 35,000 IP addresses to look up inthe SBL to see if they were there.Looking up 35,000 IP addresses one after the other takes a longtime. Too long a time.

The obvious approach was to write a SBL lookup program that internallyworked in parallel, perhaps using threads. I was using Python and ithas decent thread support, but when I started going down this route itrapidly started looking like too much

The RSS feed tricks that are really annoying me right now areall the different ways people have invented to serve partial entrycontent. Almost all of them are bad, plus the basic idea is bad too.

Serving partial entries implies that the blog authors don't expecttheir readers to be interested in most of their words (otherwise, whymake them go through extra effort to read them). The only good reasonsfor this that I can think of offhand are that very long entries orentries on a huge variety

One of the famous computer programming quotes is 'prematureoptimization is the root of all evil' (C.A.R. Hoare quoted by DonaldKnuth; attribution dammit (tm)).

A related issue is 'think about the scale of what you're planning'.A recent LiveJournal story provides a lovely example of this. To quote from it:

An increasing number of companies (large and small) are reallyinsistent that we ping them with all blog updates, for reasons Iwon't rant