Right now, there are a fair number of websites that assume that everyonecan have their own IP address and thus, if there are two connectionsfrom the same IP address that they should be considered to be the sameperson for things like load limiting, anti-cheating systems, and so on.This assumption is already false in the corporate world and has been forsome time, but it has survived reasonably well for 'consumer'-orientedstuff, because it has tended to be true of general user ISPs.

A side note on my previous entry on the cost of operation versus thecosts of development :

It is popular in some quarters to characterize the growing realizationof the (potential) costs of operation as sloppy developers finallyhaving to grow up and live in the real world (where real men programin C and are proud of it), instead of getting to paper over theirsloppyness with Moore's Law and endless hardware budgets.

This is not merely a mistake, it is wrong.

There is a rule in optimization

Our user run webservers rely on the ability torun various web applications that people want to use behind a reverseproxy. Well, the theoretical ability, because it turns out that thereare a couple of things that programs do to make reverse proxying hard(and that they could do differently to make things easier).

First is that they should be willing to use the HTTP proxy headers addedby Apache to get certain bits of information about the request, mostnotably the IP origin address. For obvious reasons, they should

Suppose you are in the situation from last entry andwant to know whether may-fail actually failed, and you don't want tojust split the pipeline up and use a temporary file.

In Bash, a commentator on the last entry pointed out that this issimple: you can use the $PIPESTATUS array variable to see the outputstatus of any command in the pipeline. The same feature is available inzsh, but it uses $pipestatus (lower case), just to be different.

If you want

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the people who've commented on my lastentry have attributed this behavior to people'sdesire to get their issues dealt with promptly (to some, this is jumpingthe queue; what you could call a 'vigorous discussion' has broken outin the comments about this, rather to my surprise). I have a couple ofreactions to this view.

First, I am pretty sure that this is not why people here do it, at leastfor the kind of cases that I

Let's start with a Bourne shell irritation. Suppose you have a commandsequence that looks like:

may-fail | grep ...

Further suppose that you want to know whether may-fail actuallyfailed. In the normal Bourne shell, you're out of luck; the exit statusof a pipeline is the exit status of the last command, and grep willprobably succeed no matter what happens to may-fail . You're goingto need to use a temporary file instead of the pipeline or

Like many places, we have several generic aliases that users mail aboutvarious issues. And, just like I expect happens everywhere, every sooften users don't use those aliases and instead email some specificperson here with their issue.

I recently came up with a theory for why this happens: it's easier toremember people (and then their email address) than it is to remembersomething impersonal. So people remember 'oh, I dealt with last timeto fix this', and