There's a really simple two-part recipe for failing to create usefulubiquitous services at universities. It goes like this:

1. come up with an important service that should be ubiquitous.
2. fund it by charging its users.

The moment you start charging people for things at a university, youenter into a competition for their money. People start asking 'whyshould we spend money on this?' and 'why should we pay you for this?'and 'is this the best use for this money?'

The Unix Heritage Society has a nice statementof its aims on its front page, but let me skip straight to the neatbits: complete source code for early Unix versions , such as V7 andV6. You can browse things online, or get your own personal mirror. Fora long time, having this sort of thing was a Unix geek dream, and now Ihave my own (legal!) copy of it all.

One of the neat things I like doing with TUHS is browsing to see

Our SMTP listener died on Tuesday evening and was restarted, so some ofthis week's statistics are incomplete. This week, we:

• got 12,614 messages from 245 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,611 sessions from 882 different IP addresses.
• received 95,812 connections from at least 38,234 different IPaddresses since 21:10 Tuesday. (And about 43,000 connectionsfrom at least

It turns out that there are actually three ssh problems introduced bythe bad Solaris ssh patch . Since it's been wellover a month with no sign or prospect of a fix from Sun, I gave in andapplied workarounds. Fortunately, it turns out that all of problems canbe made to go away with changes to /etc/ssh/ssh_config .

Ssh problem one is:

$ ssh host
dlopen(/usr/lib/gss/gl/mech_krb5.so): ld

Today I got Linux one more step into being a proper, fully functioningsystem: I got Quicktime movie trailers displaying in Firefox. It turnedout to be pretty easy once I realized what was going wrong.

I'll assume that you've got the Unofficial Fedora Core FAQ handy. Directions in a nutshell:

1. install rpm.livna.org 's livna-release package.(Ignore the other bits of the unofficial FAQ's instructions; they'renot necessary as far as I can tell.)

One of the things we have lying around here is a power meter witha handy convenient watts output, so I've spent parts of yesterdayand today measuring how much power my new machine uses in variouscircumstances.

The Unofficial Fedora Core FAQ has a sectionon how to install prebuilt packages for various things that can't beshipped as part of Fedora Core, like MP3 players and binary graphicscard drivers. I've always ignored it, installing what I needed by hand;user-friendly installs aren't necessarily very sysadmin friendly, and Inever felt like taking the risk.(I deal with enough badly packaged RPMS as it is.)

But one of the advantages of scratch installs on new machines is that

The blessing of the Internet is its ability to ignore distance.Sometimes this is its curse too.

I didn't know Gregory Blake in the way that the normal world respects.We lived far apart and never met in person, never spoke on the phone.I have only a vague idea of what he looked like, mostly from a postagestamp sized picture or two.

But the best measure of 'distance' on the Internet is not miles orkilometers, but six degrees of Kevin Bacon; how many connections

There is a world of difference between ' "string" in txt ' and just' "string" '. It doesn't even really jump out as visually wrong to meif it's in a large if condition, which probably means the conditionis big enough that it should be reorganized so that errors are moreobvious, or at least harder to make.

(Repetitive code is especially prone to this sort of slip-up for me.Unfortunately, one of my bad coding habits is quietly growing into