No one who's sane stores actual plaintext passwords; instead theyhash the password in some way and store the result, throwing away thepassword itself as fast as possible. There are three ways you can dothis:

1. you can hash just the password.
2. you can hash some global value plus the password.
3. you can hash some per-user value (a 'salt') plus the password.

If you hash just the password, anyone who can somehow gain access toyour password hashes can immediately run them through

The following thought about the push for IPv6 deploymentstruck me recently, so I'm going to dump it here.

One of the problems with IPv6 is that its major benefit is to expandthe available address space, and the expansion of address space doesn'tbenefit people who are already on the Internet. Instead they are beingasked to do a great amount of work for the benefit of other people,which rarely goes down very well.

(The people who are already on the Internet by and large

One thing I should remember is that before I start measuring things likeiSCSI performance, I should check to make sure that I'm actually using agigabit Ethernet connection. Conversely, if I get unexpectedly terriblehigh-level performance, perhaps I should make a point of immediatelychecking the network speed. Especially if the terrible performance isaround 10 megabytes a second.

(This is especially embarrassing when I forget this for the second time.)

This can happen to us for a combination of two reasons; first,

One of the long-standing splits for dynamic websites is between dynamiccontent rendering and static content rendering (where you use trickslike 404 handlers to generate a page'scontent only once, write it to a static file, and then afterwards justserve the static file).

(This assumes that static rendering is viable; for heavilypersonalized sites it may be more trouble than it's worth,if you are already effectively never generating the samepage twice anyways.)

Fundamentally the choice is tradeoff of

I think I may have finally woken up to a (potential) cause for my random NumLock issues : the xine media player. Oneindicator, one that I really should have paid attention to earlier, isthat often starting xine will turn on NumLock (and sometimes turn itoff immediately afterwards). It is of course hard to be entirely suresince the problem is erratic, but I've been doing some testing sinceI noticed the correlation and I don't think I've ever had the problemwhen

We've recently been looking into using jumbo frames on gigabit Etherneton Solaris 10U4 x86 (aka Solaris 10 8/07); it turns out that thisis more work than you might expect, and information on it is somewhatscattered.

First, as of S10U4 only a few gigabit network drivers are documented assupporting jumbo frames:

In system design, we're periodically confronted with a choice betweenbuilding our environment out of a few big systems or a swarm of smallones. For example, consider storage; if you want 48 Tb of storage, youcould buy two Sun Thumpers or six or seven smaller 15-disk units. Bigsystems are often attractive; their very size gives them economies ofscale (and often means they cost less overall), and it's easier to dealwith only two boxes instead of six or

There's any number of programming languages I'd like to learn, rangingfrom the prosaic like C++, Java, and JavaScript (mostly because itwould make it easier to work with various interesting things writtenin them, like Firefox) to the esoteric favorites like Haskell andErlang. Unfortunately, I have a problem.

My problem is that I can't learning languages by themselves in theabstract; I can't just sit down and learn one just to know it. I needto be

When I designed DWiki back in the mists of time, I decided that itwould not require any writable data store (and certainly not an actualdatabase, because that would have required me to configure and run one);I wanted to be able to run it completely read-only, so I could worryless about its security implications. I also decided that it should nothave explicit metadata embedded in page data, which are all in regulartext files.

Blog entries have one primary time associated with them, their