Engineering Management Hacks: The BigBook Technique is an amusing story of how a group of engineers got their managementto pay attention to Brooks's Law ("Adding manpower to a late softwareproject makes it later"). I won't spoil the punchline; read it yourself.

Around here we don't have problems with Brooks's Law, perhaps becausewe don't have the extra manpower to add to late projects to start with.

(From Daring Fireball .)

Your button for 'mark all items as read' should not be rightnext to the button for 'advance to next unread item'. Liferea , I'm looking at you .

(Fortunately it was not a feed with a lot of unread or updateditems. I think.)

Unfortunately, the SMTP frontend died shortly after midnight onTuesday morning, so some of the connection statistics are missingabout 2.6 days. Given that, this week we:

• got 11,652 messages from 229 different IP addresses.
• handled 16,296 sessions from 808 different IP addresses.
• received 110,313 connections from at least 35,408 different IPaddresses since early Tuesday morning.
• hit a highwater of 11 connections being

I just changed DWiki to generate absolute URLs for the '(N comments)'links at the bottom of entries in my Atom syndication feeds, instead ofthe absolute path URLs it used to generate (URLs without the https://host/portion) . This scrubs out the last non-absolute URLs in my syndicationfeed; URLs in the text of entries in the feed have always been absolute,because I'm cautious and cynical.

In theory absolute URLs are unnecessary in Atom entries, because Atomhas

Tim Bray provides Apple some instructions onhow to update files containing important data (like iCal calendars). Hisdirections are fine at a high level, but they're actually not quitedetailed enough to implement from.

So here's how you safely update Unix files:

1. create a new scratch file in the same directory as the target file(ideally mode 0600).
2. write the data to it; optionally fsync() ; optionally verify thedata.
3. copy the current version's permissions to the