Our ZFS fileservers use iSCSI to talkto the backend disk storage, so if FreeBSD is to be a viable Solarisreplacement for us its iSCSI initiatorimplementation needs to be up to the level of Solaris's (or Linux's).I recently did some basic testing to see if it looked like it was, andI'm afraid that it's not; as of FreeBSD 9.1, the iSCSI initiator seemssuitable only for experimentation.In my testing I ran into two significant issues and one

Like many other people, I sort of automatically reach for the venerable ab Apache program when I want to do some sort of a web server stresstest. I've heard that it has flaws and it's not the best program outthere, but surely it's good enough for the basics, right?

Well, no, as I found out recently. I don't know exactly why or what'sgoing on, but ab 's concurrency option plain doesn't work; you get

I tweeted :

I admire Django's attempts to screw up my entire source repositorystructure, where by 'admire' I actually mean 'am madly hackingaround'.

I'm sad to say that Django 1.4 is a great illustration of two badthings. First it is a great illustration of how not to lay out a projecthierarchy and second it is a great illustration of how not to do alayout transition.

Up until Django 1.4, the more or less canonical source layout of a

There's a pattern (or perhaps an anti-pattern) that I keep inventingin my programs. I start out with a bunch of commands (or macrosor template text renderers or the like) that can take arguments( registered somehow ), and I haveall of the functions do their own argument count validation. But thisis repetitive, so I start having the central dispatching code do somechecks on the argument count. But there are always special cases (onecommand might take exactly N arguments, another

DWikiText (the wikitext dialect of Wandering Thoughts ) hasa couple of different ways of writing links, less by design and morebecause of evolution over time. DWikiText started out with one form,later added a second that I felt was better, and then of course couldnever remove the first one because there were plenty of existing entriesusing it.When the second form was added I updated the DWikiText help to include a mention of it. More to the point I moreor less tacked it on the end of the

I've recently reached a liberating decision: I'm giving up on any plansto upgrade my laptop from Fedora 14, unless something really surprisinghappens. I'll run it with Fedora 14 until the hardware dies or I haveto replace it for some other reason and at that point, well, who knowswhat my options will be. The fundamental reason why is that I've decidedI'm not willing to accept a less productive environment just in order tohave an up to date

The blog entry of the current time interval is m. tang's yes `yes no` , which winds up exploring justthat; as the author says, doing it 'sort of slowed my computer belowthe threshold of usefulness, so I had to restart it'. Unfortunatelythe author's original explanation that the second, outer yes buffersthe output of yes no endlessly (eating up all memory in the process)is totally wrong (as various people have noted and corrected since theentry started going around

In light of Google Reader's impending shutdown I've started thinking about what I'd want out of any replacementto it that I switch to. I don't use Google Reader as my primaryfeed reader (that has always been Liferea); instead, my use is forthree somewhat contradictory things:

• feeds that I want to be able to browse from more than one place.
• casual reading feeds , where GoogleReader's slow expiry of old unread entries is a feature .
• feeds that I don

For those of you who haven't heard, MATE Desktop promises to be the Gnome 2 desktop reborn.I very much like the Gnome 2 desktop for my midlevel machines and specifically for my laptop, which has been stuckat Fedora 14 for going on two years now precisely because I refuse toabandon a productive Gnome 2 environment. Since MATE is included inFedora 18 I had high hopes of being able to upgrade at last. WhenFedora 18 was initially released I eagerly spun it up on a virtual