As a followup to yesterday's entry :

One of the reasons that interpreters and other interactive, immersivedevelopment environments improve your productivity may be indirect: bygiving you rapid feedback, they give you the feeling that you're gettingthings done, which in turn improves your motivation and morale.

(And of course this is addition to the direct fun you get from havingshiny flashing things happening right here, right now.)

Of course, this is just a feeling of productivity; it may or may not be

I recently had an insight about why so many sysadmins (and programmers)would rather have a root canal than write documentation for any lengthof time. (While some of these feelings can be blamed on people feelingunskilled, not all of them can. Certainly I can't claim with a straightface to be completely unskilled, and the idea of having to writedocumentation for any length of time still makes me gloomy.)

I think it's because documentation doesn't do anything on its own,leading

Our SMTP frontend survived all this week without problems, which wassomething of an accomplishment this week. Because this week, we:

• got 13,546 messages from 227 different IP addresses.
• handled 19,984 sessions from 1,283 different IP addresses.
• received 1,419,542 connections from at least 52,806 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 9 connections being checked at once.

Yes, that is not a

The Open Group Base Specification Issue 6 is, well, toquote it:

This standard is the single common revision to IEEE Std 1003.1-1996,IEEE Std 1003.2-1992, and the Base Specifications of The Open GroupSingle UNIX Specification, Version 2.

(Those IEEE standards are better known as 'POSIX'.)

The Single Unix Specification (SUS) is a very useful authoritativereference for how various things should behave in theory