(Disclaimer: rambling ahead.)

Once upon a time, back when Sun was still Sun, it was possible to kindof see what they thought the future market for Solaris was. Solariswasn't Linux, but they could load it with attractive features (ZFS,DTrace, arguably Zones, etc) to make up for being not-Linux and thensell it for a relatively low price to hook the low end of the market.Arguably Sun skipped the bit where they upsold to more lucrativeservices later.

There is a persistent story that makes the rounds among the webspecification world (for example, in this otherwise realistic articleon XHTML ) that HTMLis a SGML dialect but web browsers persistently mishandle and mis-parsecertain SGML features such as minimization .Although I have pandered to this belief before , it is false in practice and in reality .

HTML is really a documentation standard ;the standard followed behind existing practice, not preceded it. Inthe very beginning, people just created browsers and a vague formatthat the browsers

Somewhat recently we got a spate of spam messages to our abuse address,which set me to thinking about the mostly theoretical issue of how totreat email to it.

(It's a mostly theoretical issue for us because the volume of spam andother email to our abuse address is very low in general, so we're not atall likely to change anything about it.)

On the one hand, visible spam rejection of email to abuse addresses isone of the things that really gets on people's

One of the usual sayings derived from Fitts' Law is that four ofthe five easiest locations to reach with the mouse are the four cornersof the screen, because they require very little precision (the edgestrap the mouse and guide it into the corner). Over the years I've made some modifications to my desktopenvironment to make better use of this principle. Themost important one is how I use the top left corner ;I have my taskbar equivalent arranged so thatwhen an iconified terminal window gets output

I've mentioned FvwmIconMan in the tour of my desktop and sort of mentioned partof how I use it , but I've never really explained thedetails.

As I've set it up, FvwmIconMan is essentially a compact taskbar for myvarious sorts of terminal windows . In a densedisplay, it shows the window name for each one (well, the first part ofit at least), an indicator if the terminal has been iconified, and anindicator if that terminal has the keyboard focus. This

I've covered what you can do with metaclasses ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 )and even, sort of, the low level details of how they work( 1 , 2 , 3 ). But I've never covered the high level viewof why metaclasses work, ie what overall Python features make them go(partly because I am so immersed in Python arcana that much of thatstuff feels obvious to me, although I doubt it actually is).

To start with, in Python everything is

Back in The drawback of modern X font handling I covered how modern X font renderinghappens in the client and so can vary from client to client, goingfrom nice on one client to bad on another. I illustrated this with xterm on Fedora and Ubuntu displaying the same font, Fedora welland Ubuntu badly. I now have a good reason to change to using xterm with modern fonts, so I spent part of today poking at this issue;the results have turned this into a genuine peculiar mystery.

What I have

Recently there was a little Twitter commotion aboutJulian Dunn's Chef, devops, and the death of system administration ( he later clarified his views ).Although it may surprise people, my snap reaction to the idea ofthe death of system administration was ' good '.

(I have a number of other reactions to portions of this debate,but 'good' was my first one.)

Most of what many people think of today as 'system administration' isscutwork, at best boring and uncreative. Racking

As with the little example yesterday , a fair number of my shellscripts end with running a program and when they do, I almost invariablygo the little extra distance and do it with exec . In the old days, thereason to do this was that it used slightly less resources, since it gotrid of the shell process and left only the process for the real programyou wound up running. But, while I was around then, the reason I use ittoday isn't that; it's