Recently I read Matt Simmons' Retina display for Apple:Awesome for everyone ,which is roughly about how Apple's increasing use of high resolution'retina' displays will be good for everyone who isn't happy withgarden variety 1080p displays. While I like the general sentiment,I want to sound a quiet note of contrariness because I think thatmore 'retina' displays will not necessarily do what Matt Simmonswants.

You see (and as Matt knows), there are two sorts of

Suppose that you have an existing system that is operating withoutmirrored disks and you want to change that; you want to add a secondphysical disk to the system and then wind up with software RAIDmirroring of appropriate filesystems. This generally goes by the name of'in-place migration'. Knowledge of how to do this used to be more commonbecause back in the old days, distribution installers couldn't set upmirrored system disks during installation; these days installers can andso needing to do this by hand

Back in comments on my observation that Solaris 11 is closed source , Joshua M. Clulow noted that the Illumos peopleare working on making a better (and presumably public) version oflibzfs, the nominal interface for dealing with ZFS. Although I've movedslowly on this, I think it's time to write down my thoughts about what Iwant for dealing with ZFS.

First off, my needs are probably somewhat unusual. I don't actuallywant to do anything to ZFS through libzfs; I

After doing the stats for the most popular sender domains for spam and discovering that the most popularthing was to use our domains, I was left with a very related question:how much spam is forged to come from the victim themselves?

As near as I can tell, the answer is almost all of the spam that'sforged as from our domains is in fact forged as coming from the victimthemselves (or, for multi-recipient messages, as coming from the firstrecipient). Based on our current

To put it one way, the future problem with Python 2.7 is that the Pythondevelopers have very emphatically said that there will not be a Python2.8. That's not a problem by itself, but it becomes a problem whencombined with what I noted in Python 3 from a sysadmin's perspective , which is that Python 2 is all but certain to stay inLinux distributions for at least five years or so (and quite possiblylonger). And not just stay there as an option

The other day I did something that I don't usually do; I wrote anentry that was an index to other entries . Idon't normally create indexes to entries because they're an awkward fitfor blog (style) writing ; trying to writeindexes raises a number of issues.

The first question is both straightforward and the core question: wheredo you put such indexes? Generally you have three options; the indexcan be the first entry in a series of entries, it can be the

In my entry on the death of 'system administration' Iincluded a parenthetical aside where I said that I expected this deathto cost a bunch of people their currently well paid jobs. Since thenI've gotten some pushback to this, such as Philip Hollenback'stweet :

#devops @allspaw observes that heis hiring *more* people as automation increases: link Discuss! (hey @thatcks )

So let me discuss how I can be completely wrong in what I said aboutthe job loss.

My

Most explanations of Python's metaclasses I've seen start by trying toexplain the background and perhaps how metaclasses work, and only thendo they start into what you can do with them. This approach doesn't workfor me and I kept bouncing off these explanations, so I wrote a seriesof entries from the other way around; I started with what you can usemetaclasses for and only later explained everything else. This entry isan index to this effort.

(I feel one of the reasons metaclasses

Recently there was both an article and the resulting Hacker News discussion on the topic of where Tcland Tk went wrong. As it happens, I have some vaguely heretical opinionson this.

I have two and a half backgrounds with TCL and TK. First, I've used andminorly hacked some decent sized TCL and TK applications for years,primarily exmh ; for the half point, I'vealso written some trivial TCL/TK programs . Second, a verylong time ago I embedded an early version of