What are variables?

In many languages, variables are just labels for storage locations,for a spot in memory. This ranges from pure machine level storage, inlanguages like assembler, up through storage locations augmented withsize and type information, such as in C, all the way to Perl, where the'storage locations' are actually fairly abstract. But they're stillthere, even in Perl, partly because it's a comforting way to think aboutit: variables are where you put things .

In

This week, we:

• got 12,120 messages from 254 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,527 sessions from 926 different IP addresses.
• received 119,314 connections from at least 38,574 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 17 connections being checked at once.

Volume is way down from last week ; in factit's back to the level I consider fairly quiet (although this volumestill has a lot

A commenter on an earlier entry noted that patchadd 's exit codes are apparently not documented because they'reconsidered an internal implementation detail that might change at somepoint. Unfortunately this is bogus logic.

There's a simple rule: once you explicitly expose something to users, itceases to be an internal implementation detail in practice no matterwhat you want (and no matter what you may claim in documentation,although Sun does not explicitly claim this in the patchadd manpage).

Solaris 9 manifestly exposes patchadd 's

Sam Ruby has a problem: he has too many feeds .Specifically, he has a comment feed for every blog entry, and toomany robots and abandoned aggregators are pulling them, over and overagain, despite the feeds effectively being dead. (See his entry for his solution.)

Sam Ruby isn't alone in having this problem ; anyone with a lot of flexiblesyndication feeds is going to encounter it sooner or later . (Even if you have only a few humanreaders, some search robots love syndication