Freedom

The Prime Minister despised the idea that someone teaches him how to spend the money in my last story. But could it really be wrong to exercise his freedom of choice? This reminds me of the argument on clinical freedom, long cherished by medical doctors as essential to effective practice. Can a doctor be as noble as the Prime Minister to claim (or reclaim) the freedom to make his/her own choice in terms of medical expenditure?

If you wish to (it is not really necessary), we can regard

What promiscuous mode does on modern networks

Recently, I have wound up wondering if using or not using tcpdump 's -p switch made any difference on modern hardware and modern switchednetworks (partly because not using it causes your kernel to generate amessage every time you start and stop tcpdump , and I can live withoutthat). The somewhat unfortunate answer is that yes, it still makes adifference.

First, promiscuous mode is still at least partly a low level hardwarething in your network card, not just a software switch inside thenetworking stack.


辛酸的中國人,什麼都懂


Original source: 天涯 (原帖已被刪)

終於還是沒有跑過死神
上路孩子,天堂裡沒有豆腐渣
也沒有做不完的作業
唱不完的讚歌
也沒有人拿著火把到處奔走
也沒有人逼著你愛誰恨誰

山崩地裂的那一刻,孩子
其實只要換

善人

以前傳聞謝某常拖著滿箱過期的書籍回大學還書,並因此想像出我其實也當過這樣的聖誕老人(把書和罰款送到圖書館),但其實我並沒有這樣做過。

倒是今天,我終於拖著一個裝滿書的喼穿州過省。謝謝黎健強!


關於書的人有

Prime Minister

The dreams that I made over the last few days have been overwhelmingly trembling. You didn't believe me? I didn't think you would.

Anyhow, I went to meet the Prime Minister and got a chance to speak to him, in my dream of course. We spoke about the seismology and pre-detection of earthquake. Needless to say, this is a controversial subject. "Isn't it better to keep track of warning sign than knowing nothing at all, Prime Minister?" I suggested

Shimming modules for testing (and fun)

Suppose that you have a chunk of Python code that wants to properlymap IP addresses to hostnames , and you wantto test this code to make sure that it actually works (especially withunit tests). In order to do this you need to contrive for various IPaddress and hostname lookups to fail in various ways, and to do thison command.

The easy way to do this is to exploit Python's freedom by shimming (well, replacing) the gethostbyname() and gethostbyaddr() functions in the


現在,大家比較容易明白(reloaded)



朋友剪好了一條片,是5月1日在西洋菜南街的街頭劇行動,給大家看。片子比較沉重,也許是我那天不在場的緣故。但是剪得好的,有表達力,可以給國內朋友分享呀。現在,大家都會明白這是真切的關心。

American Gangster


這是一部非常長進的警匪片。

男主角是羅素高爾(Russell Crowe)和丹素華盛頓(Denzel Washington),這個雙雄對決的組合,原來可以媲美羅拔廸尼路對阿爾柏仙奴,那種旗鼓相當,那種惺惺相惜,很久沒有在電影中出現了。

丹素華盛頓演的黑幫新

The risks of forcing frequent password changes

People can talk about the risks of not changing passwords at the dropof a hat, but they rarely talk about the risks of forcing people to gothrough frequent password changes. This matters a lot, because thereare significant risks.

(And when people do acknowledge the risks, often it is to decry or mockthe 'bad habits' that people adopt.)

The obvious problems are that people can't remember things at the dropof a hat just because you want them to, and people have trouble coming


Making a good Unix glue language

The problem with a search for alternatives to the Bourne shell is that the Bourne shell isstill one of the best Unix programming languages. Or perhaps it wouldbe clearer to call it a 'Unix glue language', a language for connectingexisting programs together.

You might sensibly ask what the problems are with things like Perl andPython as Unix glue languages, and my answer would be that they make ittoo hard to interact with external programs. This is important, becausethe way you write small programs fast on Unix