Here is a surprise I just discovered about magic SysRq and serialconsoles: in order to have a serial console respond to magicSysRq, you need something talking to it. If your serial console is /dev/console , I believe that this is automatic; however, if it isnot (if you have hooked it up to debug systemlockups in X, for example, as a not entirely hypothetical example), youneed to run a getty or something on the serial port in order to havethe kernel notice

Courtesy of upgrading my home machine to Fedora 8 and getting a new versionof liferea in the bargain, I have been remindedof something: I really don't like applications that do smooth scrolling.

While I could pick specific nits, I suspect that a good part of thiscomes down to metaphor choices; I tend to think of scrolling as a 'turnthe page' action, for which the closest computer equivalent is justimmediately replacing the text with no fancy effects (although I want aline or two of

For a while, my general reaction to receiving phish spam from somewhereis to block it from sending me further email. This habit has led to mediscovering something depressing: how many of those places later tryto send me more email, often months after the first incident.

This is depressing because phish spam is usually sent from compromisedmachines. Getting more mail from the same machine is a bad sign; itmeans that the machine has almost certainly not been cleaned up, and isinstead still compromised and being used for