So there I was the other day ,with 35,000 IP addresses to look up inthe SBL to see if they were there.Looking up 35,000 IP addresses one after the other takes a longtime. Too long a time.

The obvious approach was to write a SBL lookup program that internallyworked in parallel, perhaps using threads. I was using Python and ithas decent thread support, but when I started going down this route itrapidly started looking like too much

The RSS feed tricks that are really annoying me right now areall the different ways people have invented to serve partial entrycontent. Almost all of them are bad, plus the basic idea is bad too.

Serving partial entries implies that the blog authors don't expecttheir readers to be interested in most of their words (otherwise, whymake them go through extra effort to read them). The only good reasonsfor this that I can think of offhand are that very long entries orentries on a huge variety

One of the famous computer programming quotes is 'prematureoptimization is the root of all evil' (C.A.R. Hoare quoted by DonaldKnuth; attribution dammit (tm)).

A related issue is 'think about the scale of what you're planning'.A recent LiveJournal story provides a lovely example of this. To quote from it:

An increasing number of companies (large and small) are reallyinsistent that we ping them with all blog updates, for reasons Iwon't rant

In case yesterday's backup horror story didn't scare youenough, here's an incomplete list of things that have been known to gowrong with backups. Are you sure that none of them are happening toyour backups right now?

• the backup program writes corrupted backups.
• the backup program doesn't capture a usable system state becausethings keep changing even as it runs (databases are famous forthis).
• the backup program generates incomplete backups, especially when runin incremental mode. For example, many

Backups have been in the geek news recently, courtesy of thechilling tale of the online comic Penny Arcade's backup failure .Making backups is important, but there's an equally important and farless appreciated piece: checking your backups to make sure that youcan actually restore them .

You may say 'but, I'm sure my system would scream a lot if somethingwas wrong'. Let me tell you a story about that.

Once upon a time there was a young and innocent systemadministrator.