This is one of those interesting little DNS glitches:

• the nameservers for the pk country domain say that gem.net.pk lists asnameservers sooraj.gem.net.pk and chand.gem.net.pk.
• if you ask sooraj what gem.net.pk's nameservers are, it gives you anon-authoritative reply saying that they are sooraj, chand, andns1.gem.net.pk.
• ns1.gem.net.pk doesn't respond.
• if you ask

Given my earlier entry that talked about OpenID's limitations , one might wonder what it's good for. There's anumber of good uses for it that I can think of:

• it's a better signature than just asking people to leave their nameor their website, in that it's harder for other people to forge andit does more to tell readers who they are.

• an OpenID identity makes a better password than yet another pieceof text that both you and the user have to keep

As I understand it, a modern X server and its graphics card drivershas two choices for low-level hardware acceleration methods: the older XAA and the more recent EXA . EXA'sbig goal is to support the sort of fancy composition and graphics thatmodern desktops and programs want to use; in particular, if it works itspeeds up Firefox's page scrolling for web pages with complex graphicalbackgrounds.

(If your card's driver supports it, you switch the X server to using EXAthrough an

Put simply, OpenID lets you prove that you areassociated with a URL. More specifically, it is a protocol for lettingyour website ask the remote URL if some visitor is associated with it.

This neatly points to the issue with putting too much weight on someonejust having an OpenID: you have no idea how the remote URL makes thatdecision. It is perfectly possible to create an OpenID server thatalways says 'yes, that person is associated with me' when asked, and infact it's been

In the traditional illustrated format:

; sdig cname scrubber2.dom1.com @ns1.dom1.commta1.otherdom.commta2.otherdom.com

This is a well-intentioned and noble attempt to do round-robin CNAMEs.Unfortunately it doesn't work, because you can't have multiple CNAMErecords; you can have either one CNAME record or any number of othersorts of records. For what this domain is trying to do, they need toget the other

Pretty much all Unixes these days have what is called a unified buffercache. If you don't know something about Unix history, this name is alittle puzzling, because what is it unifying?

The simple explanation is that originally Unix had the buffer cache,which cached blocks of recent disk IO (whether directly from userprocesses via read() and write() , or from internal kernel IO), andprocess virtual memory, used for the code and data of running processes.The buffer cache was statically

One of the rules of optimizing program performance is that there isno point in optimizing code that is not run very often; you optimizethe performance critical code, and then move on to other work. Thereis a similar principle in system design and system administration: improving an area that is not a concern to people does not reallyexcite them . To significantly improve people's lives, you have to workon something that they care about, something that is hurting them now.

An important consequence of people not caring

This week, we:

• got 10,108 messages from 265 different IP addresses.
• handled 22,107 sessions from 2,055 different IP addresses.
• received 271,991 connections from at least 75,816 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 13 connections being checked at once.

Volume is definitely up from last week .As the per day table illustrates, spammers seem to still preferWednesday for their big day:

The problem with forwarding all email for users is that much of the timeyou wind up forwarding spam email as a result, sometimes a great deal ofit. That is: your mail servers wind up sending spam email, often a lotof it, to the places that your users have forwarded their emails. Thereare two consequences of this.

First, these days large Internet providers like Yahoo don't care whyyou're sending them spam, they just care that you are. When you do sendthem