The theoretical advantage of a separate /boot filesystem
To elaborate on something I said in a comment on here , the theoretical advantage of using a separatefilesystem for /boot instead of just putting it on your / filesystemis that your root filesystem isn't limited to environments that GRUB (orthe bootloader of your preferences) can understand. This matters(in theory) because GRUB more or less inevitably lags behind theoperating system in general; first the code has to be written inand stabilized in the kernel, and then it has to be ported intoGRUB.
The git version control system as a creation of the modern age
It has recently struck me that git (thedistributed version control system that Linus Torvalds created) is verymuch a creation of the modern age. By that I don't mean that it wascreated recently or by modern, Internet-enabled methods; I mean that itonly makes sense in the modern era of really cheap, really large diskspace.
Earlier version control systems were created when disk space was muchmore expensive and not all that large relative to your source code. Inthat era, wasting disk space
An important difference
As a note to myself, there is an important difference between
; timeio 10G somefile; timeioand what I actually intended to do for the second command,
; timeio/dev/null Forgetting this difference has several times left me wondering whydisk IO read rates on test systems seemed to have dropped by severalorders of magnitude from what they should be for no apparent reason.(Since writing null bytes to your screen is a great way to burn CPU
Using fully mirrored system disks on Linux
I'm on record as building systems that usemirrored system disks with plain
/bootand swap partitions (that is,non mirrored, just duplicated), mostly through ancient caution.You know what? I was wrong. Totally wrong. I've now built a system witha fully mirrored system disk and not only does it work, it works betterthan my old way. I will henceforth now mirror
/bootand swap, inaddition to all of the regular filesystems, on all future systems that I
How not to improve your CD player application
This is one of the rare entries that I have to present in pictorialform.
Here is a 65% size view of what
kscd, the KDE CD playing program,looks like in Fedora 8 (where it is version 1.6, from KDE 3.5.10):
Here is what it looks like in Fedora 10, again 65% size:
Frustration for a sysadmin (well, for me)
To amplify on a previous entry ,I've found that the biggest thing that gets under my skin as a sysadmin,that really leaves me frustrated and short-tempered, is being helpless.Well, not exactly helpless in general; what I mean is being faced with asituation where there's a technical problem (something within my sphere)but there is nothing that I can do, or nothing useful (where I know I amjust flailing around, taking random stabs completely in the dark).
This
How libraries should handle internal warning messages
The GTK libraries have a problem; using them is evidently complicatedenough that programmers can commit errors that don't crash the program(partly because GTK can detect them). The people writing the GTKlibraries decided that they wanted programmers to be aware of theseproblems, so they'd print warning messages every time they happened.
I sympathize with the GTK people, because this is a hard problem. Youcan't detect these problems at compile time or link time, andthey're not severe enough to
An outline of a possibly easier IPv4 to IPv6 transition
While an idealized IPv4 to IPv6 transition (one where IPv6 iscompletely backwards compatible with the IPv4 network) is impossible , it's possible that IPv6 could have done somethings differently to make the transition easier. The outline of thetheoretical easier transition goes like this.
First, you officially embed the IPv4 address space into the IPv6 addressspace, so that every IPv4 address is a valid IPv6 address inside aknown area of the IPv6 space. You also need to
Why the ideal IPv4 to IPv6 transition is impossible
The idealized and ideal IPv4 to IPv6 transition would work somethinglike this: if you take a new machine and give it an IPv4 address, itcan only talk to other machines with IPv4 addresses. But if you take anew machine and give it an IPv6 address, it can talk to machines withIPv6 addresses and also machines with IPv4 addresses. Then you couldprogressively give all your new machines IPv6 addresses, and eventuallystop caring much about IPv4.
(Necessarily, any
Why 'sender stores message' schemes won't cure phish spams
A commentator on my recent entry brought up D. J.Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 as apossible cure for phish spam. The defining characteristic of IM2000 isthat the sender, not the recipient, stores the message; the recipientmerely retrieves it when they want to read it.Let's set aside all of the practical issues with sender storage schemesand ask a simple question: will they actually work to stop phish spam?Unfortunately, the answer is no. If
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