The history of terminating the X server with Ctrl + Alt + Backspace
If your Unix machine is suitably configured, hittingCtrl + Alt + Backspace will immediately terminate the X server,or more accurately will cause the X server to immediately exit.This is an orderly exit from the server's perspective (it willdo things like clean up the graphics state), but an abrupt onefor clients; the server just closes their connections out of theblue. It turns out that the history of this feature is a bitmore complicated than I thought.
Once upon a time, way back
The 'on premise' versus 'off premise' approach to environments
As a result of thinking about why some people run their own serversand other people don't, it struck me today that on the modernInternet, things have evolved to the point where we can draw adivision between two approaches or patterns to operating systemsand services. I will call these the on premise and off premise patterns.
In the on premise approach, you do most everything within a selfcontained and closed environment of your own systems (a 'premise').One obvious version of this is when
Default X resources are host specific (which I forgot today)
I've been using X for a very long time now, which means that overthe years I've built up a large and ornate set of X resources, afair number of which are now obsolete. I recently totally overhauledhow my X session loads my X resources, and in the process I wentthrough all of them to cut out things that I didn't need any more.I did this first on my home machine, then copied much of the workover to my office machine; my
Clearing cached HTTP redirections or HSTS status in Firefox
As far as I know, all browsers cache (or memorize) HTTP redirections,especially ( allegedly ) permanentones, including ones that push you from one site to another. Browsersall also remember the HSTS status for websites, and in fact this is the entire point of HSTS.This is great in theory, but sometimes it goes wrong in practice( as I've noted before ). Forexample, someone believes that they have a properly set up generalHTTPS configuration for a bunch of sites, so they
Link: About the memory management in the Bourne shell
About the memory management in the Bourne shell ( via ) is acollection of discussions about the original Bourne shell's creative,interesting, and infamous approach to memory management in theoriginal Unix memory allocation scheme .If you like this kind of thing, it's worth reading through anddecoding things.
(It also links to a recording of Stephen Bourne's BSDCan 2015 talk "Early days of Unix and design of sh" , which I haven'twatched yet but keep seeing links to
Link: A Child’s Garden of Inter-Service Authentication Schemes
A Child’s Garden of Inter-Service Authentication Schemes is anopinionated overview of service to service authentication schemesfrom Latacora ( via , which has commentsworth reading for once, including from various Latacora people).As with pretty much everything Latacora writes on their blog , it's not just informative, it'sentertaining too. I find it well worth reading.
(Latacora people include Thomas Ptacek ,who you may remember from Against DNSSEC .)
The mess Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has made of libreadline
I'll start with my tweet :
I see that Ubuntu still hasn't provided libreadline6 for Ubuntu 18.04LTS, despite that being the default and best readline to compileagainst on both 16.04 LTS and 14.04 LTS. Binaries that work across LTSversions? Evidently we can't have that.
Even the new expanded Twitter is too little space to really explainthings for people who don't already have some idea of what I'm talkingabout
A website's design shows its actual priorities
I'll start with my tweet :
Reddit's new design makes it clear that Reddit is now fundamentally adiscussion forum, not the aggregator of interesting links and thingsto read that it started out as and used to be. So it goes.
To explain this, I need to show a screenshot of the new and the olddesign. Let's start with the new design:
Ignoring all of the white space for now, look at the nice big title.Do you expect that to link to the
People receiving email don't feel it should be their job to stop spam
There is a popular observation when people get spam, especiallyspam from places that specialize in sending email such as Sendgrid , and thatis that these places are not infrequently pretty good about handlingspam issues. Sometimes they have 'complain that this is spam' linksright in the email headers (not Sendgrid, though), or similar things.But thinking that this is sufficient is a mistake, perhaps not in theshort term but definitely in the long term (in my opinion).
What places that are merely '
What ZFS messages about 'permanent errors in <0x95>:<0x0>' mean
If you use ZFS long enough (or are unlucky enough), one of the thingsyou may run into are reports in zpool status -v of permanent errorsin something ( we've had that happen to us despite redundancy ). If you're reasonably lucky, the error messagewill have a path in it. If you're unlucky, the error message will saysomething like:
errors: Permanent errors have been detected in the following files:<0x95>:<0x0 < pre>Menu
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