I saw yet another story recently on how low-powernetbooks are finally going to lead to ARM -based machinessuccessfully challenging the x86 hegemony in general purpose computers.As the story goes, netbook makers don't need much CPU power or to runWindows, but they do need very low power consumption, and so they willturn to Linux-based ARM machines.

This is a fine theory and a fine story, but I don't think it's going towork out in practice.

The traditional way of specifying that cron should run a command everyten minutes is to write out a list of every minute that the command isto run on:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /some/command

Vixie cron introduced a shorthand notation for this: ' */10 '. We useit quite a lot, since it is very convenient; it is both shorter andmore explicit about what is really going on, which means

Unix has three sorts of manpages: excellent ones that clearly answeryour questions, good ones that answer your questions if you read themcarefully, and bad ones that aren't worth reading because they don'tanswer your questions (at least in a way that you can understand).

The first sort are rare and obvious when encountered, which means thatwhen you read a manpage you are generally trying to guess whether youare dealing with the second sort or the third sort. The problem is thatthere are significantly

Commentators on my earlier entry brought up usingTwitter for system status announcements and the like. I think that thismakes sense for a lot of places, but I don't think it makes sense forus, and it has to do with where our users are; not in a geographicalsense, but in a network and Internet sense.

For many Internet companies, your users are outside, on the generalInternet, trying to get 'in' to you, and so using a status reportingsystem that is outside

We have some users that are interested in reading about technical systemstatus updates and what the sysadmins are doing in general. The obvioussolution is some sort of blog-like environment where sysadmins writethings periodically, but the problem with an actual blog is that ittakes too much time to write something, especially if we are in themiddle of a semi-crisis.

Hence the attraction of Twitter. The short length of Twitter messages(and their lack of formatting) means that we simply can't writevery much

For quite a while now, CPU vendors have been trying to persuade peopleto spend a great deal of money recoding applications to run on heavilymulticore CPUs so that the CPU vendors could continue to sell expensivenew CPUs (to put it one way ). Themotivation CPU vendors offer is that if you don't make the investment,system performance can't increase any more and then the wheels come offeveryone's wagon, not just theirs.

Now consider the current SSD boom. Pretty much everyone agrees that

In making yet another small mistake with my feed reader of choice, Ihave come to the realization that there are actually three states thatI want entries to be in, in addition to the basic 'read' one. I want tohave all of unread entries, entries flagged for later attention, andmarked (saved) entries. In fact, I think that this also holds true foremail readers, since they are dealing with the same sort of issues.

In theory, I shouldn't need the '

So, you might wonder why I wrote my own program to measure bulk IOperformance (as mentioned in this entry ). After all, there are quite a lot ofprograms to do this already, many of them very sophisticated andsome of them (like dd ) that are everywhere.

The short answer is that I wanted a program that gave me just theresults that I wanted, directly measuring what I wanted measured, andthat I understand exactly what it was doing and how it was doing it. Idid

This is a true story:

I periodically browse a few people's Twitter pages to look in on theirtweets. Until a few days ago, when Twitter choked on one of its periodicload issues and failed to serve me any of their usual CSS styling, Idid not know that the 'in reply to ' piece of the tweet statusinformation for replies was clickable and went directly to the originaltweet. This discovery was just short of electrifying, because suddenlyconversations on Twitter became several orders of