Recently I have become quite irritated at a couple of websites that Ivisit regularly. See, they have a membership system, and I'm a dulypaid member (I like them and it has some benefits (that I rarely use)),and they recently switched to using session cookies for logins. Whichmeans that every day when I visit, I get to make a time-wasting detourthrough their login page.

It's tempting to think that if you use session cookies, the users are'

To follow up my earlier entry on this stuff,I just saw another stunned monkey moment :

• you can't randomly add a trailing slash to URLs any more thanyou can randomly remove them.
• especially when the URL includes a query parameter, because thenyou're changing the query. And that always works really well.

From the pattern of the stealth spider's requests, I think it is addingthe trailing slash on any URL that doesn't end in a filename with anextension. This is stunningly

As an update on the Solaris ssh stuff and to sortof answer a question left in comments on here :

I brought another Solaris machine up to the current patchlevels today,which let me see what the current state of affairs is. The best answeris that it's confusing and not fixed yet.

• patch 112908-24 and 112908-25, the apparently bad versions of the'krb5 shared obj' patch, have been very thoroughly removed.

From email sent to the University of Toronto's InterNIC WHOIS contactemail address recently, from one vals@capris.com:

Good evening,

Our site monitoring software has alerted us that someone from yourorganization was doing a search on Google.ca for "Toronto collocation"and you visited our site, [deleted].

I was just wondering if your search was successful and if we can helpyou with your current or future hosting or collocation needs?

[...]

Val Slastnikov
Director, Strategic Alliances

The

Evince is in general a nicePDF viewer (technically it supports other formats too), much nicer andfar less irritating than Adobe Acrobat. (For a start, evince actuallyquits when I click on the 'close window' button; Adobe Acrobat presumesthat I wanted it to clear the current document.)

The problems come in when I tried to do something besides view adocument. (Perhaps evince was jealous that I wasn't satisfiedwith it.)

First, evince silently aborts printing if I have it

To update my earlier reporting , here'sthe current state, again as reported on the pca news page .

The new Sun access restrictions only apply to Solaris 10 (andanything Sun releases later). For Solaris 9 and earlier, Sun isn'tmaking any changes for patch access; anonymous access via pca continues to work. (I waswondering about that, since I have been too busy to get around togetting a Sun Online Account, yet my patch access was still fine.)

Since all

Tom Christiansen's Csh Programming Considered Harmful used to be postedto various Usenet comp.unix groups, nigh on ten years ago or so. Iconsider it sort of a pity that it isn't still being posted, becauseevery so often someone still decides that writing shell scripts in csh would be a good idea.

Some of the problems Christiansen identified have since been fixed bymodern versions of tcsh , but not all of them.

(The article can also serve as an interesting catalog of sh programming tricks.

Something I've discovered through (painful) experience is that threadedprograms cannot portably fork() in one thread and then wait() forthe forked process in another one.

This will work in some environments but fail explosively in others; theone I stubbed my toe on was a Linux 2.4 kernel based system (without NPTL , which is the usual state of affairsfor 2.4-based Linux distributions).

Admittedly, mixing threads and fork() is a bit perverse, butsometimes it

Presented in the traditional illustrated form:

; dig +short ns hinet.net.tw.reg.hinet.net.tw.www.hinet.net.tw.hinet.net.tw.

This looks good, except for the fact that they all have the sameIP address, 210.65.1.231. You would think that a large TaiwaneseISP would be able to afford more than one DNS server, but perhapsthey're too busy beefing up their network