One of the most exciting presentation at the recent linux.conf.au 2006 conference(ironically held in New Zealand) was Van Jacobson's talk on speeding upthe Linux networking stack. On a TCP stack that he says is already oneof the fastest going, he managed to well over double the performance,while removing and simplifying code, even in driver hot paths.

(For more details, see David Miller's summary here ;Van Jacobson's slides are here (1.4

Recently I read Doc Searls' The Chronological Web , where he argues (as the CentreSource blog entry that led me to his entry puts it) that most organizations need a blog.But what really made me sit up was this bit towards the end:

This helps, for example, when we talk to civilians who are new tothe Web and want to "put up a website". Very often what they reallyneed is a blog. [...] Updating a "site" is achore.

I have a modest suggestion for everyone with a syndication feed(bloggers and otherwise, but especially bloggers): read your ownsyndication feeds. It saves embarrassment.

In theory this is unnecessary, because your blogging or publishingpackage makes syndication feeds just work. In practice I have seen allsorts of things happen, ranging from repeated entries to stray markupand text here and there. Reading your own feeds means that you findout about these sorts of things and can fix them.

(Counting on reader feedback to tell you