Havoc Pennington :

The obvious reply is that most people don't have commit access. But ifsomeone's doing any kind of significant work, I think they should. Andfor my projects I've essentially always given out access as soon assomeone did any kind of largish patch or frequency of patches.

My reply to Havoc is 'what about before then?'

The advantage of distributed version control systems is that theyempower people to use version control right from the very start ofworking on your program,

A common meme among geeks is that Google's purchase of YouTube for $1.6billion shows that Google has tipped over into being a profligate,dot-com style company with more money than common sense that's makingstupid acquisitions. I disagree:

• it's not as if Google wasn't already active in the area; Google Videois living (for the moment) proof otherwise. Google thought the areawas interesting well before YouTube was a runaway success.
• given that this was an all-

I have always more or less ignored dump's -b argument, assuming it wassomething only relevant for output to tapes (which I never do; even ourbackups that eventually wind up on tapes get sent to standard output formangling by Amanda ).

Except today I was getting disappointing dump speeds from a system withfast disks, so I decided to experiment with it. And boy have I beenwrong.

Cursors on 'dumb' serial terminals blink because their location usually is the most important spot on the screen; it was where your typingwould go. Blinking made sure that you weren't going to lose track of it.

Cursors in terminal emulators blink because people haven't botheredto rethink this in the face of multiple windows. (I'm not sure thatthey've thought about it deeper than 'dumb terminal cursors blink, let'simitate them'.)

That's a strong statement

I have a machine that runs both a caching DNS server (to answer localqueries) and an authoritative DNS server; the caching server is bound tolocalhost:53, and the authoritative server to my-IP:53. Recently I wantedto let another machine use the caching DNS server.

The obvious general approach is to remap queries from the specific IP sothat they hit the caching nameserver instead of the authoritative one.I can see two ways of doing this with Linux iptables: DNAT and REDIRECT.

This week, we:

• got 14,794 messages from 260 different IP addresses.
• handled 20,016 sessions from 1,207 different IP addresses.
• received 186,129 connections from at least 47,733 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 37 connections being checked at once.

Volume is around that of last week ; Idon't know what to make of the increasing highwater. The volumedoesn't fluctuate

Aigars Mahinovs recently wrote in passing in a blog entry :

So, from this perspective, there is nothing bad in money being paidto do this mundane and hard work, if we really, really need torelease in a specific time frame ( IMHO the only reason to releaseDebian in 2006, as opposed to 2008, is the Lars tattoo bet ).

(Emphasis mine.)

This is the kind of thing that makes me reach for my editor and flailat the keyboard. There

Something that's recently struck me:

Ignorance often makes it easier to do things, because you don't knowenough to become paralyzed with indecision.

If I'd known what I now know about bicycles when I bought my bike , I might never got it. Back then I just went to a localbike shop a co-worker liked with the determination to stop delaying andget a bike that was neither too cheap nor too expensive. These days Iwould probably be trying to make up my mind about

I just discovered that my Ubuntu test machine (running Dapper, not thecurrent bleeding edge), installed with a base level of server packages,does not have cron installed.

It does, of course, have the /etc/cron.(daily weekly) directories, andcheerfully optimistic packages have populated them with various thingsthat they no doubt expect to get run every so often in order to keep thesystem working smoothly.

(Evidently none of them actively depended on cron, or it would havebeen installed.