Part of the just finished intra-university IT conference here was avendor tradeshow. The vendors were there to market to us, but thereal purpose of going to tradeshows is of course the loot; the vendorgiveaways. (And if you're hungry, the candy and snacks the vendors leaveout as lures.)

In the hopes of helping vendors at future tradeshows, I thought Iwould share some opinions on these giveaways.

• most overused giveaway: pens. If you must give these out, pleasemake sure

These days I get very little spam, and what I do get is almost allphish email, stock touting, and advance fee fraud. Partly I'm lucky,but partly I've spent quite a lot of time working on our spam filters.

A lot of spam has relatively distinct characteristics that make it easyto filter. For example, there's a limit to how obfuscated spammers canmake URLs and still have people visit their websites, and there's onlyso many places that will host spammer

One of the jobs of a package management system is to keep track ofwhat files belong to what packages. Solaris 9 keeps this informationin a single plaintext file, /var/sadm/install/contents , completewith file ownership and permission data. The format is relativelyobvious; pkgmap(4) describes most of the bits, and here isanother reference. (My Solaris 9 install does not have a contents(4) manpage; I may be missing some package.)

The official Solaris 9 way of