There are two general approaches to coping with the various environmentsof Unix accounts that I've seen people adopt. The first is taking thedefault environment that each system comes with (perhaps with minimaland easy customization for stuff that really bugs you); the second isbuilding a completely customized personal environment that you then drageverywhere.

(To stereotype, people who follow the first sort feel that life is tooshort to spend futzing with your environment when the one that someoneelse worries about works well enough, while the

Something that you can do on a modern Linux system by accident:

mount -t nfs -o hard,intr,rw localhost:/ /

(instead of mounting it on /mnt , as I had intended.)

It is surprisingly hard to recover from this. In fact, I don't think Isucceeded, and I wound up having to reboot. At the same time, I don'tthink anything broke, so I theoretically could have kept on running themachine like that.

(Why you

We got email today from a machine called 'server1.ghettowebhosting.net'(IP address 72.29.85.194).

It was advance fee fraud spam. Truth in advertising strikes again!

(I have to wonder about the mindset that makes anyone name theirbusiness something like that. Especially when they are apparently abranch of 'Complet-Inet', and say they have multiple data centers withOC-48 connections; this doesn't sound too 'ghetto

I've run into a few websites that do some of their input validation onforms and the like entirely in Javascript. If you are tempted to dothis, please don't; not only is it dangerous to you, it's annoying tousers.

It's annoying to users due to what can happen to innocent users whotry to use your forms with JavaScript turned off; if your forms arestill submittable, the user can wind up unintentionally creating baddata in your system. This is usually