Every so often I need to deal with a bunch of IPv4 addresses, andit's most convenient (and best) to have them sorted into what I'llcall their natural ascending order. Unfortunately for sysadmins,the natural order of IPv4 addresses is not their lexical order (iewhat sort will give you), unless you zero-pad all of their octets.In theory you can zero pad IPv4 addresses if you want, turning58.172.99.1

We normally don't use machines with hardware RAID controllers; we farprefer software RAID. But in the grand university tradition of nothaving any money , sometimes we inheritmachines with them and have to make them work. Which brings me to my tweet :

This hardware RAID controller's initialization of an idle RAID-6 arrayof 2 TB disks has been running for more than 24 hours now.

At one level this is probably typical; it likely took about as longfor Linux's software RAID to

In a comment on my entry on coming to a better understanding ofwhat git rebase does , Ricky suggested Imight find Understanding Git Conceptually to be of interest.This provides me with an opportunity to talk about what I thinkmy problem with mastering Git is.

It's worth quoting Charles Duan here:

The conclusion I draw from this is that you can only really use Gitif you understand how Git works . Merely memorizing which commandsyou should run at what times will work in the short run, but it’

Although I've used it reasonably regularly, git rebase has so farbeen a little bit magical to me, as you may be able to tell from my extensive explanation to myself of using it to rebase changeson top of an upstream rebase . In my grandtradition, I'm going to write down what I hope is a better understandingof what it does and how its arguments interact with that.

What git rebase does is that it takes a series of commits, replaysthem on top of some new commit

About two months ago I wrote about my then views on the CorebirdTwitter client . In that entry I said that Corebird was a great client for checking inon Twitter and skimming through it, but wasn't my preference foractively following Twitter; for that I still wanted Choqok for various reasons. You know what?It turns out that I was wrong. I now feel that Corebird is both abetter Linux Twitter client in general and that it's a better Twitterclient for me in specific. Unsurprisingly,

It started on Twitter:

@thatcks :Current status: depressing myself by looking at the status of Illumosdistributions. There's nothing else like OmniOS out there.

@ptribble :So what are the values of OmniOS that are important to you and youfeel aren't present in other illumos distributions?

This is an excellent question from Peter Tribble of Tribblix and it deserves a more elaborate answerthan I could really give it on Twitter. So here's my take on whatwe need from an Illumos distribution.

A while ago I wrote an entry on some git repository changes thatI didn't know how to do well . One ofthem was rebasing my own changes on top of a repository that itselfhad been rebased; in the comments, Aristotle Pagaltzis confirmed that his Stackoverflow answerabout this was exactly whatI wanted. Since I've now actually gone through this process for thefirst time, I want to write down the details for myself, withcommentary to explain how and why everything works. Much of thiscommentary

Rob Landley's Linux Memory Management Frequently Asked Questions is what it says in thetitle ( via ).As of writing this pointer to it, the current version of the FAQappears to be from 2014, but much of its information is relativelytimeless.

Landley's FAQ is good for a lot more than Linux specific information.It's a good general overview of a number of hardware MMU concepts and general Unix MMU concepts. Things likepage tables, TLBs, and even memory mappings are

Recently, ' fgrep THING FILE ' for me has started to periodicallyreport 'Binary file FILE matches' for files that are not in factbinary files. At first I thought a stray binary character mighthave snuck into one file this was happening to, because it's a logfile that accumulates data partly from the Internet, but then ithappened to a file that is only hand-edited and that definitelyshouldn't contain any binary data. I spent a chunk of time tonighttrying to find the binary