What I'm calling the (or a) SSD inflection point is the pointwhere SSDs get big enough and cheap enough for people to switchfrom spinning rust to SSDs. Of course this is already happeningfor some people some of the time, so the real question is whenit's going to happen for lots of people.

(Well, my real question is when it's going to happen for me,but that's another entry.)

I don't have any answers. I don

Today, I was all set to write an entry about how I especially hateslimy companies that gain access to people's address books. In factI had a particular company in mind, because it's clear that theydid this to one of our users recently. As part of starting to writethat entry, I decided to do some due diligence research on thecompany involved. What I found turned out to be rather more alarmingthan I expected.

There are two usual run of the mill ways to steal

I tweeted :

Systems without /etc/cron.d just make my sysadmin life harder and moreannoying. OmniOS, I'm looking at you.

For those people who have not encountered it, this is a Linux cronfeature where you can basically put additional crontab files in /etc/cron.d . To many people this may sound like a minor feature;let me assure you it is not.

Here is why it is an important feature: it makes adding, modifying,or deleting your crontab entries

Let's start out with the tweets:

@Twirrim :
list_object.join(',')

AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'join'
*facepalm*

','.join(list_object)

@thatcks :It's quite irritating that you can't ask lists to join themselves w/ astring, you have to ask a string to join a list with itself.

Python has some warts here and there. Not necessarily big warts,but warts that make

In the original NFS v2 , the situation withwrites was relatively simple. The protocol specified that the servercould only acknowledge write operations when it had committed themto disk, both for file data writes and for metadata operations suchas creating files and directories, renaming files, and so on.Clients were free to buffer writes locally before sending them tothe server and generally did, just as they buffered writes beforesending them to local disks. As usual, when a client program dida sync() or a

There are three major versions of the NFS protocol that you mayencounter or hear about, NFS v2, v3, and v4. Today I feel likerunning down my understanding of the broad and general differencesbetween them.

NFS v2 is the original version of NFS. It dates from 1985 and boydoes it show in the protocol. NFS v2 is obsolete today and shouldnot be used, partly because it's a 32-bit protocol that doesn'tallow access

While I've talked about the actual hardware of my home Linuxmachine , that's only part of a complete system.Today, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I feel liketalking about everything else that goes into a complete systemthat you (well, I) can actually use as a desktop machine to getthings done.

My current home display is a Dell U2412M and yes, I know, only onedisplay may strike people as a little bit odd all things

We used to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in our previous fileservergeneration and in a few other roles),although we've wound up switching to CentOS .As part of having those RHEL machines we have a RHN account, whichis registered with a specific email alias here. RHN uses that emailaddress to do things like notify us about important security updates,machines not responding, and so on. Although in practice all ofthose are basically noise, that's okay; that's what we registered

One of the criticisms of going all HTTPS on the web is that itpretty much destroys caching. As Aristotle Pagaltzis commented on my entry , caching somewhat obscures traffic flowby itself (depending on where the cache is and who is watching),and as other people have commented in various places ( cf ),caching can serve valuable bandwidth reduction purposes. I and otherpeople advocating an all HTTPS world should not ignore or understatethis. On the contrary we should be explicit and admit that byadvocating all HTTPS we are