A friend is currently polling people about what Linux distributionsthey use and why. Sincemy answer is moderately long and I dislike editing in browsers and I actually want to capture thisfor future use, I'm putting it here.

On servers, I have direct experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,Fedora Core, and Debian. We use RHEL instead of CentOS mostly becausethe university arranged a site license, so it's effectively free touse. RHEL gets used on a lot of mission critical bits of infrastructure

Non-Errors is anice catalog of things that aren't English usage errors, even though alot of people tend to think that they are. Since I do any number of themI find this reassuring, and it's amusing to see just how old some ofthese perfectly proper usages turn out to be.

(From Daring Fireball .)

My attempts to write a general 'why I like Python' entry to answer arecent comment have floundered completely. However, part of the answeris in the reasons why I like Python more than Perl, and I came up with asummary of that back when I started programming in Python (and still hada copy of it, once I could find it).

The three problems I have with Perl that Python deals with are:

1. an unstructured namespace, which means that any time I want to dosomething I

Document Centric isabout the disconnect between relational databases and regular users, andwhy people keep stuffing data into spreadsheets and the like instead of'real' databases.

(They do. Joel Spolsky has written about the Excel team's surpriseat finding this out about how real users used Excel.)

(From Carlos de la Guardia .)

One of the things I like about the Python interpreter is thatit is just about right for doing little system behavior tests,like how various systems handled a TCP port binding issue . This is because Python islow level enough to be relatively close to the actual system, so you canbe pretty sure that what you're seeing isn't Python-specific behavior,while at the same time being high level enough that you can do the testsin a couple of lines.

Strictly speaking you don't need

Years and years ago, I bound a function key in my window manager tostart xlock and then carefully trained myself to hit F10 (theaforementioned function key) the moment I got up from my chair toleave my cubicle-office. It didn't matter how trivial the errand or howshort it would be; I'd hit F10 and locked the screen. By now I havethis habit so ingrained that it's become one of my little twitches .

We have an access-

A while back I wrote, about TCP portbinding:

Unfortunately, you can't bind a port to the generic wildcard addressif anyone is using the port on a specific IP address, hence the Apacherestart problem. (Why this port binding limitation is a sensibleis beyond the scope of this margin, but it is, however annoying itperiodically is.)

Today I feel like explaining why. The core problem is deciding whogets handed a new connection (or for UDP, a new packet); if

I used to be a big proponent of getting SMP PClone servers instead ofuniprocessor ones. Nowadays, though, I'm not so sure, and I now activelytilt towards UP machines.

The advantage of SMP over UP is more CPU capacity and to someextent larger caches (if the OS scheduling works out right). ButInternet-facing servers are rarely hurting for more CPU; often youreally want more IO and maybe more memory.

(This assumes that the server is not grotesquely overconfigured to startwith,

This week, we:

• got 12,289 messages from 220 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,265 sessions from 954 different IP addresses.
• received 143,889 connections from at least 48,413 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 14 connections being checked at once.

Session volume is up slightly from last week ,but everything else is down. The per day table is relatively boring, soI'm omitting it