I've been a sysadmin here at the University of Toronto for quite along time, which has enabled me to make a natural and probablycommon (university) mistake with my email. Namely, I have by nowtotally commingled my work email and my personal email by the simplemechanism of just using my normal university account for everything.I get random technical mailing lists I'm interested in sent to myaddress here, any number of people who correspond with me use myaddress here, and so on.

Yesterday I wrote about how I don't know and can't find out howdominant the mobile web actually is .Today, let's take the (implicit) claims of the 'mobile first' designpeople as given and posit that the mobile web is either alreadydominant or going to become dominant in the not too distant future.In that case, well, I have concerns. In fact they are predictableconcerns and are basically wrapped up in that nice phrase of 'mobilefirst' design.

Put

I was all set to write an entry about how the increasing dominanceof the 'mobile web' (web usage from mobile devices) concerned me,but then I made the mistake of trying to find some reasonably currentand solid facts about how web traffic is split between mobile anddesktop and how it's been changing. Now I'm writing a differententry, because when I started looking I couldn't find anything thatfelt solid enough.

Everyone seems to agree that mobile usage as a whole is quite

I've written before about what our sysadmin environment is like but that description doesn't really conveyhow and why our environment is increasingly different from what therest of the world seems to be moving to, with the resulting verydifferent needs .Today I'm going to describe our environment from another perspective.

In our environment, we broadly do three different things as far ascomputing goes. First off, we provide a number of standard services topeople in the department, things like Samba file service, printing

This sort of starts with my tweet :

It's funny; I have a great deal of anger for what Microsoft has donewith Windows 10, even though none of it affects me directly.

Since I was asked, I'm going to change my mind and writeenough here to explain myself.

Based on information casually available to an outsider to the Windowsecosystem, Microsoft has done two things with Windows 10. First,they have significantly to drastically increased the amount ofprivacy invasive 'telemetry' that

Dave Cheney sort of recently wrote Don't just check errors, handlethem gracefully ,where he strongly suggested that basically you should never checkthe actual values of errors. This is generally a great idea, butsometimes you don't have a choice. For example, for a long time itwas the case that the only way to tell if your DNS lookup had hita temporary DNS error (such as 'no authoritative servers for thisdomain are responding') or a permanent one ('this name doesn

In the Reddit comments on yesterday's entry ,I ran across the following comment :

No. The shell literally has the sole purpose of running externalprograms. Anything more is extra.

The V1 shell read a line, split on whitespace, and executed thecommand from /bin. You could change the current directory from in theshell, that was it.

On any version of Unix as far back as at least V7, this is false.The Unix shell may have started out simply being a way

In many ways, the Bourne shell is a relatively conventional programminglanguage. It has a few syntactic abnormalities, a few flourishescreated by the fact that it is an engine for running programs(although other languages have featured equivalents of $(...) inthe form of various levels of 'eval' functionality), and a differenttreatment of unquoted words , but theoverall control structure is an extremely familiar Algol-style one(which is not surprising, since Steve Bourne really liked Algol ).

But the

As a result of looking at my SMTP session logs, one of the thingsthat I've started tracking on my 'sinkhole' spamtrap SMTP server is how many senders reachthe point where they actively get rejected by my server versus howmany senders just disconnect with incomplete sessions where everythinghas gone fine up to that point. My SMTP session logging said thatat least some just gave up, but I wasn't sure how many did this.

(Under normal circumstances you'd expect real sending mailers toalmost