This one is partly my fault, due to me inheriting responsibility formanaging DNS for this organization. (Needless to say it's fixed now,but it gives me a useful cautionary example.)

This won't be presented in illustrated form, because it's simplerto just explain the problem. All of this is for the domain transportationtomorrow.on.ca .

• according to the .ca nameservers, the nameservers for the domainare ns1.jpint.utoronto.ca and mto.jpint.utoronto

Some people using Google Desktop have been pulling my syndicationfeeds recently, which gives me the opportunity to see how well GoogleDesktop implements conditional GET .Unfortunately, the results are either mixed or unclear.

(At this point I have to repeat the disclaimer from my earlier entryabout this: I like having readers and we have a lot of sparebandwidth. This is absolutely not a request for people using GoogleDesktop to stop reading my feed.)

Google Desktop appears to sometimes but not always send (valid)If-

Presented in the traditional illustrated form:

; dig +short mx mail2world.com.10 publicms2.mail2world.com.10 publicms1.mail2world.com.; dig +short a publicms1.mail2world.com.216.163.188.54; dig +short a publicms2.mail2world.com.216.163.188.54

That's an

Today, I had an insight (possibly an obvious one) about one big reasonwhy threads are such a popular and widespread method of doingconcurrent programming:

Threads are so popular because they are so easy to implement. I don'tmean 'to write programs in', because they aren't really; I mean 'toadd to languages and language environments'. Unlike other models ofconcurrent programming, adding basic threading to your environment oryour language takes very little work. So threading implementationsproliferate like weeds