This week we received 12,079 email messages from 226 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 44,167 sessions from 4,794 differentIP addresses. Session volume is up a bit compared to last week , but well within what I nowconsider normal fluctuations.

Because we rebooted this machine Monday evening, we're about 36 hoursshort on kernel-level and total connection volume stats (and I'm notgoing to bother with per-day

Dear Internet marketers: affiliate marketing schemes that pay money are dead, killed by spammers. Please get overit and find a marketing technique that doesn't cause spam and attractspammers. (And if you are actually a spammer hiding behind'affiliates', sorry, no one believes that any more.)

Affiliate marketing pays people for traffic. When people are beingpaid for traffic, spamming becomes the most cost effective way ofgenerating it. So people spam. Anyone who opens their eyes can seethis all over

The If-Modified-Since header in HTTP requests is used as one way ofdoing 'conditional GET' requests, where the web server can give you anice bandwidth-saving '304' response if the URL hasn't changed sincethe version you already have. In theory the header has an arbitrarytimestamp and the server will 304 the request unless the page haschanged since that time.

In practice, the HTTP RFC strongly recommends that clients treat thevalue as a magic cookie, just

For reasons outlined in CPANProblem , I don't installPython packages using their setup tools; I build them into RPMs andinstall the RPMs. Python's distutils (the setup system used by mostPython packages) have a command to do this, called bdist_rpm , butit has some issues that have caused me to become quite familiar withits inner workings.

bdist_rpm works in the following steps:

1. use the distutils sdist command to create a source tarball.
2. write an RPM specfile.
3. create a local