Once upon a time, there was Usenet .Wait, that's not far enough back. Once upon a time, Usenet softwareused the simplest, most straightforward way to store articles. Eachnewsgroup was a separate directory in the obvious directory hierarchy(so rec.arts.anime.misc was rec/arts/anime/misc under the newsspool root directory) and each article was a file in that directory.Cross-posted articles were hardlinked between all of the newsgroupdirectories.

(Given that hardlinks can

One of the big excuses for HTML frames, back in the days when anyonetried to use them at all, was that you needed them to do websiteswith tables of contents and similar things (I was reminded ofthis when a commentator sort of mentioned it in passing on here ). This excuse was always bunk.

We can see how much bunk it is by looking at pretty much any blog, whereyou will find things that look an awful lot like a table of contents(and menus and so on,

There's another advantage of having thingsin the standard library: if they're in the standard library, they'llget used. This is what you want when the standard library module is theright solution to its problem (and a terrible idea if the module is abad solution), especially when there are worse alternatives.

There are a lot of problems that have a few good solutions and a lot ofbad ones; a classical example is parsing XML (using regular expressionsversus a real parser)

One of the frustrating things about putting together a Linux machine isjust how much specialized knowledge you need in order to do a decent jobof it. Today I'm going to pick on video cards, partly because it's anarea that I sort of follow so I actually know a bit about it.

Suppose that you want to spec out a new Linux machine, and you insist onusing open source video drivers instead of being willing to live withproprietary binary drivers. The leading graphics cards contenders areATI

Here is how Solaris reduced me to a grim rage just now.

We had a power glitch this weekend, and one of our Solaris serverswouldn't come up afterwards; it hit some problem that left it needingattention in single-user mode.

What problem? I couldn't see. Solaris printed the problem to the machineconsole, but then it kept producing more boot-time output . Lotsof boot time output, all of it unimportant (one or two lines per iSCSItarget that it could connect

Here's a request to programmers: if you are building a system withsome form of dynamic control and adjustment commands, like Bind 9 andits rndc program for controlling the daemon's behavior on the fly,your interface should not include 'toggles', commands or options thatinvert the current state of a setting. In rndc , an example is ' rndcquerylog '; this turns DNS query logging on if it is off, and turns itoff if it is on.

(In fact this extends to

Bind 9's rndc has tasty looking options to change and increase loggingon the fly, which is just what you want if you're trying to track downan erratic behavior in a caching nameserver (where restarting the servermight well make the whole thing go away so you can't troubleshoot what'sgoing on). However, it turns out that you need some Bind configurationoptions already configured in order to make it work. Since I just wentthrough figuring this out (and I may need to

I've written before about theover-arching problems with how Debian and Ubuntu package kernels, buttoday I ran into another annoying issue with how Ubuntu handles theirkernel packaging mess.

The problem Ubuntu has is that their kernel packages need to have thekernel version as part of the package name, but they want to createa simple way of upgrading from kernel to kernel without too muchspecial magic in the tools (as an entirely new package, a new kernelis not an upgrade for any existing package so package

A commentator on reddit made a decent point on my last entry ; toquote:

Sometimes you just have to set aside time to find the best of breedand get to know the code you are using. [...] Exploration has acost in software projects, and sometimes software projects fail(sub-project in this case).

I agree with this on large, important projects. if you're settling into make a significant investment of time in programming something, youshould expect to take a