I'm not going to fault Firefox for not supporting the CSS 2.1 ' word-wrap: pre-wrap ',no matter how convenient it would be for me if it did.Especially since CSS 2.1 is not yet a standard, merely a late stageworking draft. But I am annoyed that Firefox doesn't support the CSS2' display: compact ', since I could have used it just now.

' display: compact ' is classically used (in that it is right

I've mentioned Richard Gabriel's famous The Rise of "Worse is Better" before (back here ), but only recently did oneof its important lessons coalesce in my thoughts.

"Worse is Better" contrasts what Gabriel calls the MIT approach , with the cornerstoneof 'the right thing', against the New Jersey approach , with a 'worseis better' minimalism (this is a simplified summary). Gabriel arguedthat despite its flaws, the New Jersey approach had significantly bettersurvival characteristics than the

One of the quiet little secrets of university computing is just howdifficult it is to actually punish people for doing bad stuff withcomputing resources. Really bad stuff, things that are criminal orhave serious civil liabilities, can be punished. But mere violations ofpolicies or bad network behavior (including spamming) can run into aseries of problems.

Tenured professors might as well be the left hand of God, of course,especially if they get grant money . But evenstudents (grad and undergrad both) are heavily protected

To follow up my previous entry on iostat problems ,here's a rundown of the information you actually get from the Linuxkernel.

First off, you only get this from 2.6 kernels, or 2.4 kernels with theRed Hat disk stats patch (such as Red Hat Enterprise 3). In 2.6 thisinformation appears in /proc/diskstats ; in Red Hat's 2.4, it appearsin /proc/partitions with slightly more fields.

/proc/diskstats fields for

Every so often having comments on here really pays off. A commenteron my previous entry gave me a pointer to pca (Patch Check Advanced), anactual sane patch management program for Solaris machines; if you wantmore reasons to take a look, see my longer comments .

One of the nice things about pca is that it led me to the patchdiag.xref file, which is a big cross index of all of the Solaris patches, and to patches.sun.com in general. Patchdiag.xrefis

A very long time ago, I spent a year being an Amiga programmer as partof a small team writing an application. We wanted it to have a busymouse cursor (the general hourglass 'this is going to take a while'cursor good apps put up during long operations), but what with one thingand another, we wound up with two problems:

• we weren't actually sure what user actions would take a longtime.
• we got to 'implement a busy cursor' rather late in the whole

It turns out I made a mistake in my Hotmail stats for this week that missed some Hotmail rejections thatwere for @sympatico.ca addresses. There were actually 11 messagesrefused due to their IP origin, from six different IP addresses:

This is a two part safety tip:

1. most things that roll Apache logfiles SIGHUP Apache to get it toclose and reopen the logfiles
2. when Apache is SIGHUP 'd, it closes its current set of sockets andtries to listen on the set that its configuration file says itshould use.

So, if you have changed Apache's configuration of what it should listenon, and something else is currently camped on one of those places,something that is scheduled to be killed off during an impendingreboot, and your logfiles

The basic volume numbers for this week are that we:

• got 19,744 messages from 236 different IP addresses.
• handled 19,083 sessions from 955 different IP addresses.
• received 139,156 connections from at least 43,459 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 31 connections being checked at once.

We got more emails this week than usual mostly because of a small mailloop explosion during the week that added several thousand