Generally I'm not a big fan of LVM. It has a lot of moving parts, addsan extra layer of indirection, and the whole set of commands and taskshas always felt rather complex; there was too much fan dancing for theresults I'd get.

But I have a new machine to set up, and I have to say that moderndisks have really made LVM tempting. The problem is that they'vegotten so big that I no longer have any idea what I want to do

A quick observation:

There is nothing quite like writing up the documentation for a newfeature you've just programmed to poke you into realizing just howlame your quick implementation is, and spur you into doing a better,less limited version. Somehow it is just hard to put the limits of aquick hack down in the black and white of text; making the limitationsexplicit makes them all the more cringe-worthy and petty.

Every so often I wind up having to fix up a Solaris 9 machine thatdoesn't have Sun's wget or the like installed. Presumably there isan official way of dealing with this, but so far I have just used myunofficial brute force approach.

Solaris packages in their native form are just subdirectories (withpiles of stuff), with the directory name being the package name; on theSolaris 9 CDs, they're found in the subdirectory Solaris_9/Product .One of the formats

The really irritating thing about voicemail is that unlike email,there's no random access to voicemail messages. Unfortunately thisis really because it's being presented to you in audio, which is afundamentally linear medium.

(Audio menus are a not very successful attempt to get around this.)

This means that the real solution is to have your voicemail emailed toyou, or put up on a website, or in some other way available through yourcomputer, where you can use all sorts of good random access

Hard disk partitioning on PCs is one of those confusing areas, full ofpeculiar features and apparently random limitations, especially thewhole primary partitions versus extended partitions thing.

Fortunately, it's actually fairly simple:

• primary partitions are just a fixed size array in the firstsector (the master boot record, among other things).
• extended partitions are a chain (a linked list).

Each extended partition starts with a sector (the ' extended masterboot record ')that describes how big it is and then points to

I recently used ' help() ' on one of my own internal modules, mostly asa quick way to browse the entire function/class collection in one go.Now, I'm kind of a slacker when it comes to using docstrings (for somereason I prefer comments before the function), so I didn't expect tosee very much in the help() output.

Much to my surprise I saw things like:

hostFromEnv(env)  # Extract the host from the  # REQUEST_URI

While the Berkeley FFS and derivatives like Solaris UFS are much, muchbetter at dealing with fragmentation than the original V7 filesystem(which continued on into System V before SysVR4), they can actually getfragmented over time to a degree that matters.

Traditional Unix, Solaris included, really doesn't have any tools fordefragmenting filesystems; instead, you get to to do it the bruteforce way, by copying everything into a clear filesystem. With SolarisDisksuite and mirrored disks, it is possible to do this

This week, we:

• got 15,100 messages from 230 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,312 sessions from 982 different IP addresses.
• received 156,592 connections from at least 49,202 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 36 connections being checked at once, set onSaturday (today).

Message volume is up from last week ,but I'm not too surprised; this is the start of classes

What iTunes and similar online services are really selling isconvenience and guilt-avoidance, with a small side order of helpingout the artists. They're manifestly not selling the music itself (orvideos or etc), since you can find them online yourself if you look hardenough.

The 'helping out the artists' bit is currently only a small side orderbecause most everyone understands at some level how little of the moneyinvolved actually makes it to the artists.

The guilt-avoidance is not a good long