X11: How does “the” clipboard work? ( via )is a technical walk through the modern X11 selection system , one that winds up discussing thingsat the level of the X protocol and Xlib, with helpful code examples.I learned some quite useful things in the process, for example howto use xclip to query thingsto find out what formats a selection is available in.

(Technical details about X selections are relevant to me becauseI use a program that dealswith them and which

The other day I needed to do some network bandwidth tests to and from one of oursandbox networks and wound upwanting to use a spare second network port on an already-installedtest server that was fully set up on our main network. This callsfor policy based routing to force our test traffic to flow only overthe sandbox network,so we avoid various sorts of asymmetric routing situations ( eg ). I've used Linux's policybased routing and written about it here before, but surprisinglynot in

In yesterday's entry I said somedeeply cynical things about people who design web pages with permanentlypresent brand headers and sharing-links footers (or just permanentbrand-related footers in general). I will condense these cynical thingsto the following statement:

Your page design, complete with its intrusive elements and all,shows what you really care about .

As the logic goes, if you actually cared about the people readingyour content, you wouldn't have constantly present, distractingimpediments to their reading. You

Late last August, I tweeted the following rant :

I'm reading your article in Firefox's reader mode because your fancy,very pretty page layout sucks and gets in the way. Yes, yours.

You can improve your article layout immediately by removing thepermanent bottom bar that wants me to share it on Twitter andFacebook.

Is your company's branding more important than your article? Yourpermanent top bar with your brand identity says that it is, to me.

I know, you're posting

Although I normally only use scp , I'm periodically reminded thatOpenSSH actually supports two file transfer mechanisms, becausethere's also SFTP. If you are someone like me, you may eventuallywind up wondering if these two ways of transferring files with(Open)SSH fundamentally work in the same way, or if there is somereal difference between them.

I will skip to the end: sort of yes and sort of no. As usuallyconfigured, scp and SFTP wind up working in the same way on

Last week, I tweeted :

The sysadmin's lament: I swear, I thought this was a small rock when Istarted turning it over.

As you might suspect, there is a story here.

Our central Unix systems have a lot ofwhat I called system continuity ; the lineageof some elements of what we have today traces back more than 25 years(much like our machine room ). One suchelement is our logins and groups, because if you're going to run Unixfor a long

I made a strong claim yesterday in an aside:I said that Apache with mod_wsgi is the easiest and most seamlessway of running a Python WSGI app, and thus it was a pity that itdoesn't support using PyPy for this. As I have restarted it herethis claim is a bit too strong, so I have to start by watering itdown. Apache with mod_wsgi is definitely the easiest and mostseamless way to run a Python WSGI app in a shared (web) environment,

What I'm going to call system continuity for my lack of a betterphrase is the idea that some of the time in some places, you cantrace bits of your current environment back through your organization'shistory. You're likely not still using the same physical hardware,you're probably not using the same OS version and possibly even theOS, the software may have changed as may have how you administerit, but you can point at elements of how things work today and say'they

I have a long-standing interest in PyPy forthe straightforward reason that it certainly would be nice to geta nice performance increase for my Python code basically for free,and I do have some code that is atleast somewhat CPU-intensive. Also, to be honest, the idea andtechnology of PyPy is really neat and so I would like it to workout.

Back a few years ago when I did some experiments ,one of the drawbacks of PyPy for my sort of interests was that it took a