I've been using a lot of different machines lately and thus customizingFirefox on them, which means I've been playing around with Firefoxextensions a bunch more than usual (new environments are both a good wayto find out what I find essential and to play with things I'm not sureabout in an expendable setting). This makes it a good time to writedown my current set of them for future (and current) reference.

Essential extensions that I turn out to install everywhere:

All-

When the "best tool for the job" isn't argues that what we might think is the best tool for the job isn't. (I'mnot going to mangle its ideas by trying to summarize it more than that.)

This is an issue that I sometimes feel moderately acutely, since I useX Windows in preference to something like OS X, while the general viewis that Apples are the machines for people who want both Unix and adecent user experience (and there's a

How to to really irritate your successor sysadmin on a Solaris machine:

Set the machine's hostname not by changing /etc/nodename , but byhand-editing a ' hostname foobar ' into the /etc/init.d/network startup script.

Of course, you won't want to keep the machine current on patches either;otherwise, your successor might take a much longer time to find this,and have a much less exciting day.

Important caution: for the safest results, insure that you

I've recently had the experience of installing Ubuntu from one of their live CDs, and I now have tosay that this is a genius idea that should be widely imitated, and assoon as possible.

For me, the genius of a live CD installation is three-fold, and is onlytruly compelling when the machine has a network connection:

• I can Google around to figure out what I want to do next, understandany peculiar questions the installer is asking me, and so on.
• if anything goes

I hate RS-232 serial connections, because something always goes wrongwhenever I have to deal with them and then I have to figure out howto make the things work. Needless to say, there are next to no commondiagnostic tools for troubleshooting serial communication problems.

In this case the problem was a mysterious inability to type anythingto the remote device when I could receive the remote device's outputfine. For my future reference, this can be caused by having hardwareflow control on when the remote

Recently, I've come to believe that Unix's file (okay, inode) accesstime is increasingly useless. The problem isn't that Unix is slipshodabout maintaining atime ; the problem is that there are now anincreasing number of things that read files as a routine matter, and sofile atime is increasingly nothing more than the last time one of themran.

The most obvious example is any backup program that works through thefilesystem, which most of them do (especially the commercial ones).

This week, we:

• got 12,284 messages from 218 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,177 sessions from 899 different IP addresses.
• received 152,193 connections from at least 48,479 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 7 connections being checked at once.

Most of these are up somewhat from last week ,although they're within the levels that I've come to think of as 'normalvariation'

Web design purists like to talk up XHTML at the moment, but as far as Ican tell almost everyone who is trying to do XHTML today is a masochist(or ignorant).

First, Internet Explorer does not support XHTML. Not even IE7 willsupport XHTML, which means that for all practical purposes you cannotserve only XHTML to visitors; some of them need to get an HTML versioninstead.

The usual dodge is to serve the same XHTML document as XHTML to browsersthat can handle it but as text

Ten Risks of PKI: What You're Not Being Told About Public KeyInfrastructure is a paper byCarl Ellison and Bruce Schneier. These aren't technical risks, at leastnot directly, and it makes for interesting reading. (And after you'redone reading your printed copy of the PDF you can leave it out in astrategic spot for other people to run across.)

(From this comp.lang.python article by Edward Elliot, which I ran across through the Daily Python URL .)