This week we received 11,661 email messages from 245 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 49,500 sessions from 5,900different IP addresses. Email volume has held steady from last week , but session volume isdown.

Overall connections are actually up from previous weeks: 251,000, fromat least 41,000 different IP addresses. Our SMTP frontend hit 50simultaneous pending connections early in the week,

People who are considering setting up serial consoles for their Linuxmachines often wind up a little bit confused about what's necessaryand what sort of features are possible. A lot of this is natural,because the PC is fundamentally convinced that the console is the moreor less mandatory video display.

This results in a situation where there are many different consoles ina Linux system. I'll inventory them, in the order that they getencountered during booting a system.

1. where the BIOS output appears. Expensive servers (

The most common attempts to define 'spam email' is either as 'UBE'(Unsolicited Broadcast Email) or 'UCE' (Unsolicited Commercial Email);for example, the spamhaus.org definition here . I tend to think thatthis sort of definition of spam has some problems.

Let's start with a provocative question: is advance fee fraud(so-called '419' email) spam email? (You know this type of spam;the classic version has Mrs. Mariam Abacha,

In the weblogs world, to 'ping' somewhere is to send an automatednotice to an indexing site that your blog has updated. Popularindexing sites include weblogs.com and technorati.com . Major blogging packagesalready do this out of the box, but if you've rolled your own(such as me, with DWiki ) you're on your own.

In a modern blog world with millions of blogs and RSS and Atomsyndication feeds, something like weblogs.com looks more than alittle bit old

In C, a common idiom for initializing multiple variables to the samevalue is serial assignment:

a = b = c = 0;

Python allows for the same thing; just remove the semicolon in theabove and it's valid Python syntax, and it even works. So when I wasstarting Python, I wrote things like that. And then one day I wrotealmost the same thing, in an __init__ function in a class:

self.fooDict = self.barDict = {}

The