On the surface and ignoring some issues, one of the easiest things tooffload into cloud computing should be our compute servers. But inpractice in our environment it isn't so; as a result I expect that we'llbe running some degree of compute servers for years to come.

The great advantage that local compute servers have is that theincremental cost for a grad student to use them is zero . The gradstudent and/or their professor does not have to find some money (evenspare change money

Xargs is generally a nice command that more or less works right.Some people could criticize Unix for needing it so much (which ismostly a product of command line length limitations ) and the need for -0 is a bit annoying,but on the whole it's good. But xargs has one little corner casethat is really annoying; as a bonus, it's even non-portable in anirritating way.

Here it is, presented in illustrated form:

$ xargs echo does run 

As a sysadmin I'm used to my Unixes having certain amenities andconveniences. I've come to accept that any non-hobbyist Unixdistribution that wants to be taken seriously (especially a free one)will have things like an announcements or security updates mailing list,a bug tracker, at least a somewhat visible security contact point,and documentation about all of this (along with things like how oftensecurity updates are made for any particular release and indeed therelease policy). Some form of signed or verified

The usual way to talk about the modern trend of filesystems withinherent checksums (such as ZFS and btrfs) is to say that the checksumsexist to detect data corruption in your files (and in the filesystemas a whole). In an environment with a certain amount of random bitflips, decaying media, periodic hardware glitches, and other sourcesof damage, it's no longer good enough to imagine that if you wroteit to disk you're sure to read it back perfectly (or to get a

A Twitter conversation from today:

@thatcks : Let's see iffsck can heal this Solaris machine or if I get to reinstall it fromscratch. (Thanks to ILOMs I can do this from my desk.)

@bdha :fsck? Solaris? Sadface.

@thatcks : I have horrorstories of corrupted zpool.cache files too. I don't know if you canboot a ZFS-root machine in that situation.

@bdha : I've been there.zpool.cache backups saved my

In a comment on this entry , Aristotle Pagaltzis asked:

(Though I admit I wonder why you do have fred-1 and fred-2 [source directories] rather than branches in your VCS.)

The simple answer is that my favorite way of changing branches is with cd . This is especially the case if I'm developing things in paralleland may well wind up throwing one of them away; for good reasons VCSesmake totally deleting a branch much harder than a plain ' rm -rf '.I

Somewhat recently I wrote about when I'd use a web server otherthan Apache (despite Apache's temptations ). I've recently discovered that I need to changethose opinions somewhat; Apache turns out to be much more usablethan I expected in a constrained resources situation.

One of my recent hobbies has been testing DWiki in a low-memory virtualmachine ( as I mentioned once in passing ). I didmy primary testing using nginx because ithad an SCGI gateway, but with that working I decided

My data on how many recipients our average inbound email has is in practice incomplete. It's quite possiblefor a single address here to expand into multiple destinations; someaddresses are mailing lists and some people just forward their email tomore than one place. So an interesting companion question is how manyexternal recipients a typical email has. To make this more applicableto what I'm interested in, I'm looking at this only for email from theoutside world.

As before, this covers 89 days

One of the reasons for Django's unpleasant project restructuring is that they want your websitedirectory (ie the directory that your project sits in) to be a modulethat can be imported. This in fact seems to be somewhat of a generaltrend; all sorts of things rather want you to to have not just acollection of files in a directory but an actual module. I wish they'dstop. Modules are not the be all and end all in Python, at least not ascurrently implemented, and