In the spirit of earlier heroic failures , I justsaw someone attempt to put an entire POST form in the actual HTTPrequest. No, really. The incoming request looked something like this:

login=%5Burl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextlevelnews.com%2F [.. elided..] %2F70.html%0D%0A+&view=login&page=blog%2Flinks%2FBestToolPOST/~cks/

The more I do stuff on my x86_64 Fedora Core 5 machine, the more Icome to understand that people must not have actually tried to use thisstuff. The latest adventure was trying to build an i386 RPM.

The best tool for this is mock , a tool forrebuilding RPMs in distribution environments, like (in theory) 'FedoraCore 5 for i386'. In practice, it needs some clubbing. The mainproblem is that when mock sets up

Here's wcat , which is short for 'web page cat':

#!/bin/shexec wget -q -O - "$@"

(At some point I may need to add ' -e robots=off ' to this, but Ihaven't needed it yet.)

I have a flaw when it comes to my little scripts :often, I think that sometime is too small and trivial to botherturning into a script, so I don't for ages. And

The more I use Fedora Core 5, the more I've fallen in love with FedoraExtras. (I skipped straight from FC2 to FC5 and FCE came in with FC3, sothis is the first time I've gotten to use it.)

This love is kind of silly, because Fedora Extras is not much more thanFedora catching up to Debian et al in having available a vast amountof prebuilt software. But boy is it convenient to have all that stuffaround, ready to dip

I've finally found a good use for reading blogs in the reversechronological order that everyone (even syndication feed readers)defaults to.

For various reasons, I am way behind in reading the syndication feedsthat I (nominally) follow. In this situation, reverse chronologicalorder turns out to be great for cherry-picking the current news andgetting a quick sense of any important recent developments.

(It's not that the older entries are valueless, but since they've waiteda while already they can

This week, we:

• got 15,275 messages from 261 different IP addresses.
• handled 21,183 sessions from 1,301 different IP addresses.
• received 172,030 connections from at least 42,834 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 18 connections being checked at once.

Volume is up somewhat from last week ,but not hugely. The per day volume level fluctuates significantly:

I was writing code today where I needed to turn a single backslash('\') into two backlashes ('\\') in order to quote it (so that theshell wouldn't eat it, through a combination of annoyances). Myfirst attempt was:

s = s.replace(r"\", r"\\")

To my surprise, this gave me an error, and a peculiar one: Pythonreported SyntaxError: invalid token (at the closing ')'

One of the things my earlier entry got me thinking aboutwas how differently people can see the issue of machine identity. Or, tomake it more concrete, when do you give something a new name (even ifthe name is only in your head, not related to the OS-level hostname)?

(I could try to justify it by talking about how it shows something abouthow people think about their computers, but really it's just the kindof thing that satisfies my wandering curiosity, like discussions

One of my DNS diagnostic tools is a program called nsdig ; it makesa query to all of the authoritative servers for a zone. This makesit convenient to both look for inconsistencies and see what theauthoritative servers are saying, as opposed to whatever is filteringthrough your local caching servers.

As another one of my little shell scripts , and asa practical example of how little utilities stack on top of each otherto everyone's benefit, here's nsdig and its component bits:

; cat nsdig#!