Recently, I've come to believe that Unix's file (okay, inode) accesstime is increasingly useless. The problem isn't that Unix is slipshodabout maintaining atime ; the problem is that there are now anincreasing number of things that read files as a routine matter, and sofile atime is increasingly nothing more than the last time one of themran.

The most obvious example is any backup program that works through thefilesystem, which most of them do (especially the commercial ones).

This week, we:

• got 12,284 messages from 218 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,177 sessions from 899 different IP addresses.
• received 152,193 connections from at least 48,479 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 7 connections being checked at once.

Most of these are up somewhat from last week ,although they're within the levels that I've come to think of as 'normalvariation'

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