One of the jobs of a package management system is to keep track ofwhat files belong to what packages. Solaris 9 keeps this informationin a single plaintext file, /var/sadm/install/contents , completewith file ownership and permission data. The format is relativelyobvious; pkgmap(4) describes most of the bits, and here isanother reference. (My Solaris 9 install does not have a contents(4) manpage; I may be missing some package.)

The official Solaris 9 way of

I've known for a while that the Python interpreter has a few littleinternal limits and implementation quirks . I canaccept that; limits on the sizes of internal objects are not unexpected,and you have to draw the line somewhere.

But I was surprised to discover that the Python interpreter has a limiton how many arguments you can write in a function call; 255, as ithappens.

(The limitation is on explicit arguments in the source code; you cancall functions with many more arguments if

The Planet Lab consortium is, toquote its banner, 'an open platform for developing, deploying, andaccessing planetary-scale services'. Courtesy of a friend noticing , today'splanetary-scale service appears to be repeatedly requesting robots.txt from people's webservers.

Here, they've made 523 requests (so far) from 323 different IPaddresses (PlanetLab nodes are hosted around the Internet, mostly atuniversities; they usually have 'planetlab' or 'pl' or