The other day a weblog I read had a post (and their RSS feed) blow up because of invalid markup: an entry wasquoting some text that had bare '<'s in it, nothing escaped them, andinvalid HTML tags got generated and ate part of the entry. (Theproblem's now been fixed.)

There's nothing noteworthy about this, and that's the problem: peoplemake this mistake all the time. HTML has a bunch of picky rules tokeep track of

Here's a surprising reason to have a really large RAID stripe size: toreduce per-spindle IO loads for random IO.

How and why this works is going to take some explanation. First,modern disks read and write very fast; what costs time isseeks. Random IO means lots of seeks. In random IO on a striped RAID,this means that any time you have to touch a new disk you pay anadditional seek cost. And you switch disks every time you cross astripe boundary.