Here is a conundrum that I have recently run into, posed as a question:when you run a Gnome application remotely through ssh-forwarded X , where does it get its Gnome configurationsettings from?

In the old days of X resources , this sort of question hada simple answer; custom settings were attached to the screen itself(they got stuffed into an X property) and thus were accessible to all Xprograms, regardless of where they were running. In the new ultra-modernworld of GConf and friends

It's now a bit over a year since we first deployed our disk-basedbackup system (although I only wrote it up in May,after we built the second machine). This makes it a good moment to lookback and talk about how things are going, especially since someone Iknow asked me just this question recently.

On the whole the answer is that things are going well and quietly; withone exception, there haven't really been any surprises or gotchas. Theone exception is that

In light of recent developments , here isone pessimistic view of a future for Oracle's Solaris.I wrote before that I didn't think thatOracle had suddenly decided to get into the operating system business;instead, they might see Solaris as infrastructure for their actualproducts. Well, take that to its logical end point and what you getis Solaris as Oracle's captive operating system.

As their captive OS, Solaris exists to run Oracle products and not formuch else. It gets improvements only when

Well, that was fast. Back in ReadingSolarisTeaLeaves I wrote:

Any free version of Solaris 10 is now basically a sampler, muchlike Oracle has done with a personal use version of their database,and I wouldn't be surprised if the Solaris license was revised toreflect that in a while.

When I wrote this, I was thinking 'in six months or so'. Infact it was less than a month; as Ben Rockwood wrote recently , Solaris isno longer free to use. You can

I mentioned in the last entry that 'worklogs',email reports of what we've done on our systems, work for my current jobhere at the university but did not really work for my previous job, tothe extent that we fell out of the habit of writing them. As it happens,I have some theories on why this happened; in fact, I think that thereare two important contributing factors, one technical and one cultural.

The first is that we have an official search interface (and

Over the past few years, I've become a real fan of using checklists . But I wasn't always this way, and I think how I evolvedto using checklists in my work is an interesting illustration of howsmall cultural things can make a big difference.

As far as I can reverse engineer the evolution, it goes like this:

A few years ago I switched jobs within the university, moving to a newgroup . The new group had and has a strongculture of writing what we call '

Suppose that you have a program that runs another program and uses itsoutput; for example, you have a high level analysis program that runsa low level state gathering command (or several commands) to gathervarious information.Here is something that I have recently learned the hard way:

You really want to give your high level program an option to getthis status output from a file instead of by running the commands.

Doing this saves you from having to recreate a specific scenarioeach time you want to test how your

One of my always-running programs is a little Tkinter-based Pythonapp. For a while now I've noticed that it was accumulating a surprisingamount of CPU time and would sometimes show up on top as active,despite me not doing anything with it. Today I finally got around tofiguring out why, and the answer is that Tkinter's main loop effectivelybusy-waits in some Python environments.

The standard way for Tkinter-based programs to operate is to make all ofthe Tkinter calls to

We just applied a kernel update to all of our Ubuntu LTS machines. Thisis a quite verbose process; on the machine I captured logs for, itproduces no less than 40 lines of status output (and another 14 linesbefore things start installing). And this count understates thingsbecause some of those are very long lines that wrap around on any realterminal.

(The kernel updating was done with ' apt-get install ... '.)

I'm sure that the authors of the