The obvious traditional risk of outdated documentation in all its formsis that you rely on it and go wrong somehow; you trust the comments inthe source code and write your new code accordingly, and your changesdon't work. I think that this risk is especially acute for sysadmins,for two strongly related reasons.

First, much of our documentation tends to be about procedures, notsimple information. Following what is actually a wrong or incompleteprocedure is a great way to create spectacular failures on the spot.Worse

Every so often, commonly in the context of SSL certificates, someoneputs forward the theory that charging money for things makes thecustomers somehow more identifiable and reliable than giving it topeople for free (with the same other authentication of customers).After all, so the theory goes, when you give people something justbecause they have a particular email address, that's not much, but whenyou've charged their credit card, you have a lot more confidence intheir real identity.

This is wrong.

Much to my displeasure, Ubuntu seems to have been steadily making theversion of vim that they ship more and more superintelligent. I do notwant a superintelligent vi ; in fact, superintelligenceis a net negative in vim , because unlike with GNU Emacs it is almostalways wrong . So, unlike the first set of vim options ,these are negative options that I need, things that turn off settings.

So far, I have wound up with:

set formatoptions=l

Turns off automatic line wrapping. Since viis

DWiki has always had the ability to do the common blog thing of 'clickhere to see the rest of the entry'; when I put it in, I expected touse it for things like the detailed stats at the end of this entry . Because I am crazy that way, I built thefeature so that it could apply on the main page (pages, really), insyndication feed entries, or both, depending on what options I turned onin any particular entry.

In practice, it turned

I recently wound up reading a message about upcomingbehavior changes to the .com/.net/.edu nameservers ( via DawnKeenan ). The shortsummary of that message is that as of March 1st, those nameserverswill mostly stop returning information about out of zone gluerecords .

Up until I read the message, I had not realized that these nameserverswere still carrying (and in fact returning) out of zone glue records andit was just that modern DNS systems were not paying attention to them; I

Like a lot of other people, I'm not very interested in the iPadmyself for all of the obvious reasons for an open source personwho likes doing random things to his computers (see Tim Bray for arepresentative example). But I have a theory about what Appleis up to here, and it goes like this:

The iPad is a computer for people who do not like computers, not acomputer for people who like computers.

The problem with making computers for people who like computers is thatit

I can't claim to know very much about cryptography programming, but Ilike to think that I have picked up on a few mistakes to avoid. Here'sone of them: you want to sign exactly what you are authenticating, notsome mangled version of it .

(Note that 'canonicalizing' things is a form of mangling them.)

Suppose, as a not entirely hypothetical example ,that you are signing some sort of web request with a bunch of (URL)parameters. In order to deal

Once upon a time, AT&T had Unix, and Unix was big (by the standards ofthe time); it contained all sorts of things that made it useful. AT&Tdecided that it wanted to make as much money as possible from Unix,so it had a brilliant idea: it would sell a bunch of pieces of 'Unix'separately, as additional cost extras. After all, Unix systems wereprimarily used to run canned vendor-developed software (or at least AT&Tno

In some quarters, it is popular to grumble about how much better thingswere back in the good old days of computers, Unix, or whatever. I don'thold with this view at all; I think that the modern age is great, andnow I'll tell you one reason why.

I started working with Unix systems what is now quite a long timeago. Back in those days, you couldn't get SCCS without paying extramoney to AT&T (and sometimes you couldn'