There is a peculiar joy that is probably more common among sysadminsthan programmers: the pleasure of having successfully debugged someoneelse's program.

Triumphing over a bug in your own program is already a pretty goodfeeling (assuming that it is a tricky bug, not something stupidlyobvious that leaves you wanting to smack your head). Doing it to someoneelse's program gives you not just the reward of having squashed thebug but also the accomplishment of having sliced through enough of theprogram to find the problem and

I'm somewhat considering buying a new home machine.If I used Windows, this would be an easy process; I could just go overto the local cluster of computer stores and pick up an inexpensivegeneric white box machine, or just buy something from Dell et al if Ifelt the need for a name brand. I wouldn't have to think about whatcomponents were inside the box because the result would invariably runWindows, although perhaps not without minor glitches; everyone buildsthings that run Windows.

(

The modern X world of Gnome and KDE and so on has a fair amount torecommend it; applications are sophisticated, genuinely nice to lookat, and have a lot of useful functionality. But there are a few thingsabout the old clunky world that I miss, and one of them is command linearguments.

(Anyone who doesn't think that old-style X was a clunky hideous placeis invited to start up an old application that dates from those days,if you can find any that are still

Modern versions of Python helpfully have infinite-precision integers.This is often useful (and they are intelligent ), but there are periodic situations where I reallydo want to operate with fixed-size integers, rollover and all. My mostrecent need was computing a hash that wasspecified in terms of unsigned 32-bit operations (well, it was specifiedin C code that was doing such operations).

(It's common for hashes, checksums, and so on to be specified with thissort of

For once, there's two pieces of good Solaris news from Oracle. The firstis that Oracle has announced an agreement with Dell and HP that makesSolaris officially supported on hardware from the latter; you will beable to run it legally and you will be able to get support, includingpatch access. The one cautious provisio is that we don't yet know ifthis covers all of HP's and Dell's servers or only some of them.

(The Oracle press release about this is here

OpenBSD's pf packet filter has a feature where you can NAT yourinternal IP addresses to a pool of gateway IP addresses, wherethe pool is specified as a CIDR netblock. The pf.conf manpage describes thevarious options one has for how this happens. If you need a randomlydistributed but consistent mapping, source-hash is what you want.

(Random distribution makes all of your gateway IP addresses more or lessevenly used, regardless of how you distribute IPs around your internalIP address space. Consistent means

The title of this is a little bit misleading; ultimately, the reallyimportant thing about Oracle's Solaris decisions is not what those decisions are, it isabout how they were implemented. I don't like the decisions, but thereal problem is their abrupt, no-warning implementation.

Let me be completely clear here: by making these decisions, Oraclescrewed people. By implementing them with no advance warning, Oraclescrewed people harder.

The consequence of this is that Oracle has lost my trust. I

The University of Toronto's Internet link went down recently (well,became really slow and lossy, so we may just be being DDoS'd orsomething). I'm at home, so when I noticed the link problems I shruggedand carried on; it's not as if my home machine depends on stuff fromwork, so I didn't expect anything beyond the annoyance of not being ableto get to work networks.

(Although the network being unreachable was going to be somewhatinconvenient,

A long time ago, I wrote about the power that grant funding givespeople at universities . But there's a flip side togrant funding, and it is that people with grant funding often don'treally have money as the business world thinks of it.

From the outside, it looks like people with grant funding are rolling incash; they get hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even million dollargrants. From the inside, though, that money is almost entirely tied downfor very specific things.