Web design purists like to talk up XHTML at the moment, but as far as Ican tell almost everyone who is trying to do XHTML today is a masochist(or ignorant).

First, Internet Explorer does not support XHTML. Not even IE7 willsupport XHTML, which means that for all practical purposes you cannotserve only XHTML to visitors; some of them need to get an HTML versioninstead.

The usual dodge is to serve the same XHTML document as XHTML to browsersthat can handle it but as text

Ten Risks of PKI: What You're Not Being Told About Public KeyInfrastructure is a paper byCarl Ellison and Bruce Schneier. These aren't technical risks, at leastnot directly, and it makes for interesting reading. (And after you'redone reading your printed copy of the PDF you can leave it out in astrategic spot for other people to run across.)

(From this comp.lang.python article by Edward Elliot, which I ran across through the Daily Python URL .)

One of my little sysadmin twitches is that when I amusing mv to move things into a different directory, I try to alwayswrite it as:

mv foo bar /

(Note the the trailing slash on the directory.)

This is a safety measure: if I typo the directory name, mv will errorout with a no-such-directory error message instead of renaming the fileto 'br' or the like. Speaking from personal experience, tracking downjust what happened to your file when you make this

Oscar del Rio's comment on a previous entry has ledme to take a look at blastwave.org for my Sun freeware needs; I had previously tried out sunfreeware.com , mostly becausethat comes up first for a Google search on [Sun Freeware] .

Blastwave is a breath of fresh air on Solaris, in that it is a clumsierversion of what I've come to expect as basic functionality from Linuxpackage managers like apt and yum : you have your automatic fetchingof stuff and running of pkgadd

There is a persistent belief, held by a large assortment of even fairlyexperienced people, that Unix files have a creation time. They don't.

The belief generally arises because one of the three times that allUnix files have is called ctime , going along with mtime and atime .However, the 'c' stands for 'change', not 'creation'; an inode's ctime is updated more or less any time various data fields in the inode itselfare changed.

(The exact details of

One of the cornerstones of my X setup is an xterm feature that a lot ofpeople probably haven't heard of: -ziconbeep . The manpage explanationis too long and obscure to quote, so I'll summarize: if an iconified(aka minimized) xterm with -ziconbeep gets output, it puts ' *** ' atthe front of its title (technically only the icon name) and optionallybeeps. (When you de-minimize the xterm, the title addition goes away.)

This probably