At this point I have only one significant Python 2 program that Icare deeply about and that is DWiki , the pile of code that underlies WanderingThoughts . What to do about DWiki in light of Python 3 hasbeen something that has been worrying and annoying me for some time,because doing a real port (as opposed to a quick bring-up experiment ) is going to involve a lot of wrestling with oldcode and Unicode conversion issues. Recently I've come around to aconclusion about what I plan to

Yesterday I wrote that we're probably going to need a new LinuxiSCSI target for our nextgeneration of fileservers, which I optimistically expect us to beginworking on in 2018 (when the current ones will be starting to turn fouryears old). But as I mentioned in an aside, there's a number ofthings up in the air here and one of them is the big question ofwhether we want to keep on using any sort of SAN at all or move toentirely local storage

When I think ahead to our theoretical 2018 fileserver refresh , one of my thoughts is that we're probablygoing to need new iSCSI target software. We're currently using IET and while we like it andthere's is nothing deeply wrong with it I have to admit that itlacks some moderately important features and the pace of itsdevelopment is what could politely be called 'quiet'. In fact it'ssufficiently quiet that I don't know if IET will be adapted tofuture

If all goes according to my vague schedule, we should be at leaststarting to plan our third generation of fileservers in 2018, when our second generation fileservers are four years old. 2018 is not all that far off now, so every sooften I think a bit about what interesting things might come upfrom the evolution of technology over the next few years.

Some things are obvious. I certainly hope our entire core networkis reliable 10G (copper) Ethernet by 20

One of the small annoyances of Go's explicit error returns isthat the basic approach of checking error returns at every stepis annoying when all the error handling is actually the same . You wind up with the classicannoying pattern of, say:

s.f1, err = strconv.ParseUint(fields[1], 10, 64)if err != nil {   return nil, err}s.f2, err = strconv.ParseUint(fields[2], 10,

Writing about the somewhat surprising history of chroot() did leave me with one question: when did chroot() start to confine processes inside the new root directory hierarchy?This is an interesting moment because it marks the point where chroot() stops being a little hack to help emulation and insteadturns into a security feature.

(The first use of chroot() as a security feature seems to be inthe 4.2BSD ftpd , as covered in the first entry .I can't be completely sure

Microsoft's outlook.com has been a spam sewer for me for sometime , which is not really surprisingfor Microsoft but still annoys me. Recentlythings got a bit worse and more annoying than usual, for a simpleand nominally trivial reason: spammers have started sending spamthrough outlook.com with a null sender address (a MAIL FROM of' <> ').

(The spam itself was ordinary advance fee fraud spam.)

This irritates me for several reasons. First, a null sender is an

In an exchange of comments on my entry on blocking floating webpage elements , Nolan mentioned Firefox's Reader mode andI said that I'd had bad experiences with it and used 'view page inno style' instead. Well, let me take that back. Back the lasttime I looked at it there were various glitches and issues that convinced me I didn'twant to use it (and in fact I banished it from my Firefox's bysetting reader.parse-on-load.

Modern Linux by and large works quite well on my (work) laptop; Iuse Fedora, but I have no reason to believe that things Ubuntu orDebian would be any different. However every so often there areparts of the whole system that disturb me, and one of them isdefinitely how suspending and screenlocking interact in, say, Cinnamon .

The brief description is that if I suspend the laptop and thenresume it (such as by closing the screen and then later opening itup again), the laptop