One of the small paradoxes of the web is that it is often theconnections with the least bandwidth that put the largest load on yourweb server.

This is because each connection consumes a certain amount of serverresources, ranging from kernel data structures for socket buffers up toan entire thread or process on a dynamic website. The slower someone'sconnection, the longer they tie up up this stuff on your end as youslowly feed them data. Conversely, people on fast connections get in,get their data,

As part of a longer entry, Muharem Hrnjadovic asks :

I would love to see examples or code snippets that are made possibleand/or improved greatly by leveraging functools.partial() .

I'm not sure that my example qualifies, but I'll take a shot at it.

DWiki has a WSGI-like processing pipeline to handlerequests; they get passed from function to function, possibly gettingmutated on the way down and possibly having the results mutated on theway back up.

The pipeline functions look

Programs like fdisk , sfdisk , and even parted are really irritatingto deal with most of the time because they ask you too many nitpickingquestions. What I want is a partitioning program with a command oriented'shell' interface, with the core command being:

make N SIZE [TYPE]

This makes partition N be SIZE big (with the default units beingmegabytes), optionally making its type be TYPE (which can be in hex orin English). If N is 1 to 4, it is a primary

A recent Slashdot story pointed to this article onone company's more flexible approach to work hours. It hasthe line:

The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on outputinstead of hours.

My immediate cynical reaction is that this is a marvelous theorybut doomed in most practices. The root problem is the sameseductive thought in management that leads to excessive overtime : 'if my employee is getting all this done in Nhours now, think how much more work she could do in N+Y hours

Today, I had the distinct pleasure of discovering that /var/run mustexist on the root filesystem , even if you have a separate /var filesystem . If your root filesystem does not have such a hidden /var/run , you experience mysterious failures of various boot stuff,including an inability to bring up the network; for bonus points,nothing gives you any meaningful error messages.

(For bonus points, the default Ubuntu server startup sequence wipes out the console scroll buffer, so you can't scroll