One persistent general belief, probably most common among a subset ofthe people who insist on going commercial for products (instead of opensource), is that your problems are over once you have a contract forsomething with some appropriate entity.

This is false. Contracts and agreements and so on do not insureactual performance , especially performance to your satisfaction ; all that they actually do is enable you, intheory, to recover some amount of money some distance in the future. Inpractice this 'remedy' is so

I like awk , I really do, but sometimes it really irritates me. Take, forexample, this fun little awk program:

awk 'BEGIN {print "5" == "05"}' /dev/null

You might rationally expect this to print '1' (awk's boolean truthvalue). As I found out once, you would be sadly mistaken; this isfalse, presumably because awk winds up doing a string comparisoninstead of a numeric one. Too bad if you

Here is something important to remember about your users:

Users are rational.

Users aren't crazy, and they don't do things just to irritate you; whatthey do and what they report about problems is not crazy from theirperspective, however odd it looks from yours. If users report 'I cannotlog into the intranet' when they cannot log in to the IMAP server, it isnot because they are stupid, it is because 'the intranet' is how theythink about your system .

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On the surface, crawling syndication feeds looks like an attractive ideafor web spider operators (although I am not convinced that the metadatathey get is on the whole any better than the metadata on web pages).But as things are today, it is a terrible idea and is highly likely toprovoke bad reactions if attempted.

The big problem is that right now, if you turned a web spider loose onsyndication feeds it would pull far too many of them. This is becausepeople (and websites) have lots