I have a modest suggestion for everyone with a syndication feed(bloggers and otherwise, but especially bloggers): read your ownsyndication feeds. It saves embarrassment.

In theory this is unnecessary, because your blogging or publishingpackage makes syndication feeds just work. In practice I have seen allsorts of things happen, ranging from repeated entries to stray markupand text here and there. Reading your own feeds means that you findout about these sorts of things and can fix them.

(Counting on reader feedback to tell you

As a system administrator, I like to see console messages even whenI'm in X (which is almost all of the time). On my systems, consolemessages come from high priority kernel messages, high priority notesfrom syslog, and sometimes messages from init, and I like to knowabout all of these.

In theory, xterm's -C command line switch should do thisnicely, and indeed it did for years. These days, there aretwo unfortunate problems with it:

• back in 2

The current official plans are for Debian to release Etch (the nextversion of their distribution) in December 2006, already more than ayear and a half after Sarge, their last release. (Since Sarge shippedwith already obsolete versions of programs, it will effectively beeven longer.)

Unfortunately, I believe Debian has made some decisions that willsignificantly slow down Etch and even subsequent releases. Thismatters to me because old, stale versions of programs has been mymajor problem with Debian; the slower

Another week, another set of cruddy Hotmail spam numbers. Let's seehow bad things are this week:

• here's a new one: no email accepted from Hotmail this week.
• 216 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
• 107 messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 20 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
• 6 messages refused due to their origin IP address (three for beingfrom SAIX, two for being on the SBL, and one