To quote Glyph Lefkowitz (from here ):

Aah, the singleton. Global variables for the new millennium.

I'm not against global variables, but I am against misleading peopleabout them. The Singleton pattern lies about them; it looks like youhave a normal object, but you really have a global variable withoutknowing it.

(And if everyone knows you have a faux global variable, you are justtarting up a global variable in 'object-oriented' clothes. This islike respecting the letter of

Today's fire drill was caused by our printing system not printing;since it is the first day of classes, it was not a good time todiscover this. After fixing a couple of small problems, the bigstumbling block was authentication not working.

Our printing system has a central machine that handles quotamanagement and a per-lab machine that handles the actual printspooling and printing. This requires the labmasters to talk to thequota server to tell it about pages that got printed.

Because I am paranoid,

Concurrency may or may not be hard (I know people who disagree with meon that). But I am sure that it is tricky. As an illustration, I justfixed a DWiki concurrency bug that I first spotted in MyFirstCommentSpam .

For simplicity, DWiki stores each comment as a file in a directoryhierarchy that mirrors the page's DWiki path; if you comment on the DWiki page /foo/bar , the comment will be a file in a /foo/bar/ directory (under a separate top

It's always nice when people build debugging support into theirnetwork daemon. However, I have a modest suggestion:

When your daemon is designed to be run under inetd / xinetd ,writing debugging output to standard error is a bad plan.

(You win bonus points for also logging it to syslog, so that aninnocent person might be deluded into thinking that it's only going via syslog.)

Because, you see, all that nice debugging output is going to go flyingstraight off to the clients talking

In theory, WanderingThoughts has been syndicated on LiveJournal as the LJ usercks_techblog( here ) forsome time. In practice, LiveJournal has an undocumented, hard-codedlimit on how large syndication feeds can be; go over the limit and LJrefuses to process your feed. Because I dislike small limits, DWiki defaults to putting lots of entries in syndication feeds, more thanenough to exceed LiveJournal's size limit given how I write.

(LiveJournal compounds the problem by not allowing a syndication feedto be

This Friday I discovered a neglected web-based bulletin board on oneof our web servers that was open for posting. Unfortunately, commentspammers had discovered it months before I did and had been gleefullyexploiting it since then. The result gives me an unpleasant, fullthrottle view into the world of comment spammers.

The raw numbers are appalling: in the time they were active, thecomment spammers posted at least 233,799 spam comments (fortunately,the web board only stored the last 10

Overall connections are up from last week : 239,000 SMTP connections from39,000 different IP addresses. The SMTP frontend's highwater mark isup again, hitting 29 simultaneous connections.

Top 10 kernel level SMTP rejections:

Host/Mask           Packets   Bytes213.4.149.11          13913    638K192.35.251.3          13025    625K