I have a modest suggestion for everyone with a syndication feed(bloggers and otherwise, but especially bloggers): read your ownsyndication feeds. It saves embarrassment.

In theory this is unnecessary, because your blogging or publishingpackage makes syndication feeds just work. In practice I have seen allsorts of things happen, ranging from repeated entries to stray markupand text here and there. Reading your own feeds means that you findout about these sorts of things and can fix them.

(Counting on reader feedback to tell you

As a system administrator, I like to see console messages even whenI'm in X (which is almost all of the time). On my systems, consolemessages come from high priority kernel messages, high priority notesfrom syslog, and sometimes messages from init, and I like to knowabout all of these.

In theory, xterm's -C command line switch should do thisnicely, and indeed it did for years. These days, there aretwo unfortunate problems with it:

• back in 2

The current official plans are for Debian to release Etch (the nextversion of their distribution) in December 2006, already more than ayear and a half after Sarge, their last release. (Since Sarge shippedwith already obsolete versions of programs, it will effectively beeven longer.)

Unfortunately, I believe Debian has made some decisions that willsignificantly slow down Etch and even subsequent releases. Thismatters to me because old, stale versions of programs has been mymajor problem with Debian; the slower

Another week, another set of cruddy Hotmail spam numbers. Let's seehow bad things are this week:

• here's a new one: no email accepted from Hotmail this week.
• 216 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
• 107 messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 20 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
• 6 messages refused due to their origin IP address (three for beingfrom SAIX, two for being on the SBL, and one

I've recently been looking into Sun's Ultra 20 line of workstations.This surprises a lot of people who hear about it, because they wonderwhy I'm thinking of moving to Solaris and a Sparc from Linux and a PC.

The answer is that I'm not. But it's an easy mistake to make, becauseSun has chosen a totally confusing product name. You see, the Ultra 20is not yet another one of Sun's Sparc-based Ultra workstations,

In the spirit of yesterday's entry on a Unix annoyance :

If you're fond of Unix, and especially if you're uncritically fond ofUnix, it's good to read the Unix-Haters Handbook (originally published in dead trees format, but now available online);another website on it is Don Hopkins' here ,which has bonus bits and pieces.

I don't agree with the Handbook; my position is probably closest toDennis Ritchie's marvelous anti-forward, which really

Unix: where you have to escape command line arguments twice, oncefrom the shell and once from the program.

I dearly love Unix, but I am forced to admit that every so often ithas what I can only describe as 'robot logic'; things that areperfectly logical, but not to normal humans. For example, consider thefun of trying to remove a file called something like " -Brad Foo ".

$ rm -Brad Foorm: invalid option -- B$ rm "-Brad

The correct place to put your site navigation is on the right side ofyour pages, not the left. (This assumes you have enough geegaws thatthey don't fit in a header or a footer, but then most people do.)

There's two pragmatic reasons why.

The most important is what happens if the page is too wide for theuser's browser, namely the browser displays the left however much itcan fit in. In this situation, which is more important for the user to

One of the things that writing WanderingThoughts has been good for isgiving me a good exposure to all of the spelling mistakes I makeroutinely. I've long been interested in linguistics, so I findspelling mistakes that happen all the time interesting, since Isuspect that they're a sign of deep linguistic mechanisms atwork. (Unfortunately I don't know enough linguistics to know what theyare, or if anyone's ever studied the field.)

I believe that I generally spell words phonetically, but