I suppose it was inevitable, but the marketers have definitely arrived;the otherwise excellent In The Pipeline 'ssyndication feed now has banner ads. Animated banner ads atthat. I find this especially irritating because the feed is already a partial text feed , which means that I'm goingto visit the website anyways (because I have to). Adding animatedbanner ads on top is just adding insult to injury.

I honestly don't know why marketers still keep doing this. Everyonewith three brain cells to

I helped a coworker debug an interesting Linux problem today, and inthe process wound up reinforcing something that I already more or lessknew but hadn't really thought about for a while. Namely:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart doesn't unload and reloadthe kernel modules for your network devices.

A networking restart will bring down and then restart all of yourinterfaces, reset parameters and so on, but the one thing it doesn't reset is kernel modules. They

There's a lot of Unix idioms that I use often enough to have turnedinto little shell scripts. Here's the first of them; I call it howmany :

#!/bin/shtrap '' 13sort "$@" | uniq -c | sort -nr

(The trap is necessary because of a Linux bash issue .)

Howmany does what its name says: it counts up how many times each lineof its standard input appears, then shows them from most to leastfrequent

Xiostat is the program I wrote to giveus a faithful recounting of the Linux kernel's disk IO stats after we discovered the problems with iostat's numbers . I've now finally gotten around to putting it up on theweb and making a page that explains how to run itand what its output means and so on.

The current version is a bit slapdash, but I have verified that it(still) works on bog standard 2.6 Linux kernels (and thus should work onDebian Sarge,