I've recently been taking another pass at optimizing DWiki 'scode a bit. In the process of profiling things, I noticed somecode that was doing linear searches through an ordered list (forreasons that made sense at the time). What my code was doing justcried out for a better bisection-based approach, and it lookedlike I was in luck; not only does Python have a bisect module in the standard librarybut CPython actually has a C-level implementation for the bestefficiency you could

I still sort of run a mail server which gets a low enough connectionvolume that I can monitor the logs directly. This MTA rejectsconnections from SBL listed IPs, at asufficiently low volume that I almost always look into the actual SBLlisting (partly because I may want to apply my own blocks, includingIP-level ones).

In the beginning, the volume of SBL hits was low but most of the actualSBL listings were for network ranges (not just single IPs) owned by whatI privately characterized

One of our options as a replacement for Solaris 10 is to switch from Solaris to FreeBSD (now that I no longer believe youneed Solaris for ZFS ). There are both advantages anduncertainties to such a move and today I want to ramble on a bit abouthow I see both sides.

On the one hand, we have no particular attraction to Solaris as Solaris.On the other hand, Solaris is the devil we know and this particulardevil works pretty well for us (plus I've come around

Suppose that you're creating a small DSL and a Python program thatneeds to parse it (something that I've wound up doing several times)and you want to make this as easy on yourself as possible. Pythondoesn't currently have a really good solution for easy to write and useparsers, so the easiest way to go is to write one by hand and in theprocess design your DSL so that it's as easy to parse as possible. Myexperiences in this have led me to

There at least used to be a broad belief that user mode servers forthings like NFS, iSCSI, and so on were generally significantly worsethan the same thing implemented in kernel mode. I've reflexivelyhad this belief myself , although I no longerthink it has much of a basis in fact. Today, sparked by a commenton this entry and my reply there, I feellike working through why (to the best of my ability).

As always, let's start with a fundamental question:

Recently an interesting discussion of my entry on what systemd gets right broke out on Google+, including both interesting stuff and somethings that I want to respond to. What sucks about the modern Web2.0 social web is that I found this discussion basically only throughluck.

Oh, I knew that someone on Google+ had linked to my entry and hada bunch of readers; I could see the Referer s from plus.url.google.comcome rolling in in my web server logs. But in

I hope it will not be news to people that Unix is neither perfect norcomplete. By this I mean that there are things that a traditional Unixsystem doesn't do ideally and that can be improved as well as any numberof things that it doesn't do that people really do want. I'm not talkingabout minor technology additions on the side (IPv6, say); I'm talkingabout significant additions and changes.

(If you feel that Unix is only a server OS you

A commentator on Unix needs to grow asked for someexamples of what I had in mind and, well, the resulting comment got awayfrom me.

This is a very incomplete list written off the top of my head (and isin no particular order). All of these issues are from the perspectiveof 'traditional Unix', the Unix on static servers that most everyoneagrees is more or less fully Unixy. While modern Unixes have dealt witha number of them it's often not in ways that people

This is kind of a rant. The issue is on my mind because we spent a chunk of this evening applyingkernel updates to our Ubuntu machines and rebooting them, somethingthat we feel forced to do once every few months or so. One of thereasons that we don't do this more often, such as every time when Ubuntureleases a kernel update, is that kernel updates are among the mostdisruptive updates that there are; in order to make them take effectyou must reboot the machine, which is