In the spirit of my little shell scripts, here's a simple way to get auseful summary of disk space usage on a Unix system:

du | sort -nr | less

(substitute the pager of your choice for less , and use ' du -x ' asnecessary.)

This is less pretty than the various graphical disk space visualizationprograms that float around, but I find it gives me pretty much theinformation I need. It's pretty easy to narrow down what areas of thefilesystem,

This is one of those Bourne shell idioms where I show the code firstand explain the effect later:

#!/bin/shdef=$1; shiftcase "$#" in  0) if test -t 0; then        cat -- $def     else         cat     fi;;  *) cat -- "$@";;esac

Call this selfile . You use it in things like log scanning scripts,invoking it as:

selfile /var/log/something "$@" | .

Every so often in my Python programs I need to initialize adictionary with a whole bunch of values (and then pass it offsomewhere). For a long time, my usual approach to this was:

d = {}d['a'] = b.whatd['c'] = foo(d)....

Recently I stumbled over the better way to do this, which isembarrassingly obvious in retrospect:

d = {      'a': b.what,      'c

This week, we:

• got 11,513 messages from 227 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,277 sessions from 912 different IP addresses.
• received 133,583 connections from at least 42,540 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 8 connections being checked at once.

This is about the same as last week . Tuesday,Wednesday, and Thursday were the busiest days this week for connections;I suppose that's not

As time goes by, there's an increasing amount of stuff I want to writedown. One of the things that stalls me out on this (apart from the sheereffort of writing) is the question of where and how I should put them;in particular, should I make a wiki page or write a blog entry?

In theory this shouldn't come up; WanderingThoughts is part ofa hybrid wiki-blog, which I've extolled the virtues of before . In practice this is an illusion