This week we:

• got 12,292 messages from 221 different IP addresses.
• handled 16,875 sessions from 807 different IP addresses.
• received 125,999 connections from at least 41,642 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 11 connections being checked at once.

Nothing went wrong this week, thank goodness; no reboots, no SMTPfrontend restarts, nothing.Weekly volume seems to be back to the normal level when

One of the nice things about writing a blog is getting to say 'oh, oops,I was a dumbass, let me fix that'. Today I have to own up to a bigexample of this.

Back at the start of WanderingThoughts , I wrote an entry where I complained in part:

In theory the absolute URL should include the port (unless it's thedefault). In practice, every program I've tried gleefully adds theport itself if it is a non-standard port and

I am afraid that I am too busy listening to the Men WithoutHats to writetoo much tonight, so I am just going to trot out some of myirritations with Python's socket module . Allof these are on Unix machines.

(I suspect that portability to Windows is the reason for some of these,but it doesn't mean that I'm not irritated by them.)

• socket.error . Let me count the ways:

  • most instances should actually be IOError or OSError instead.
  • it has

Part of the just finished intra-university IT conference here was avendor tradeshow. The vendors were there to market to us, but thereal purpose of going to tradeshows is of course the loot; the vendorgiveaways. (And if you're hungry, the candy and snacks the vendors leaveout as lures.)

In the hopes of helping vendors at future tradeshows, I thought Iwould share some opinions on these giveaways.

• most overused giveaway: pens. If you must give these out, pleasemake sure

These days I get very little spam, and what I do get is almost allphish email, stock touting, and advance fee fraud. Partly I'm lucky,but partly I've spent quite a lot of time working on our spam filters.

A lot of spam has relatively distinct characteristics that make it easyto filter. For example, there's a limit to how obfuscated spammers canmake URLs and still have people visit their websites, and there's onlyso many places that will host spammer

One of the jobs of a package management system is to keep track ofwhat files belong to what packages. Solaris 9 keeps this informationin a single plaintext file, /var/sadm/install/contents , completewith file ownership and permission data. The format is relativelyobvious; pkgmap(4) describes most of the bits, and here isanother reference. (My Solaris 9 install does not have a contents(4) manpage; I may be missing some package.)

The official Solaris 9 way of

I've known for a while that the Python interpreter has a few littleinternal limits and implementation quirks . I canaccept that; limits on the sizes of internal objects are not unexpected,and you have to draw the line somewhere.

But I was surprised to discover that the Python interpreter has a limiton how many arguments you can write in a function call; 255, as ithappens.

(The limitation is on explicit arguments in the source code; you cancall functions with many more arguments if

The Planet Lab consortium is, toquote its banner, 'an open platform for developing, deploying, andaccessing planetary-scale services'. Courtesy of a friend noticing , today'splanetary-scale service appears to be repeatedly requesting robots.txt from people's webservers.

Here, they've made 523 requests (so far) from 323 different IPaddresses (PlanetLab nodes are hosted around the Internet, mostly atuniversities; they usually have 'planetlab' or 'pl' or

Engineering Management Hacks: The BigBook Technique is an amusing story of how a group of engineers got their managementto pay attention to Brooks's Law ("Adding manpower to a late softwareproject makes it later"). I won't spoil the punchline; read it yourself.

Around here we don't have problems with Brooks's Law, perhaps becausewe don't have the extra manpower to add to late projects to start with.

(From Daring Fireball .)