I'm going to lead with the Hotmail spam numbers, because they continueto be catastrophic.

• two emails accepted, both from spamlike Hotmail usernames.
• 376 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
• 134 messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 17 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
• 5 messages refused due to their origin IP address (four for being inthe SBL and one for being sent from SAIX, which has an advance feefraud spam problem)

In both RSS and Atom syndication feeds, feed entries can have anidentifier element (optional in the case of RSS, mandatory in Atomfeeds). The entry ID is supposed to be permanent and stable, no matterwhat; things that process feeds use it to know what they've seenbefore and what they haven't.

This might seem like an unimportant picky thing, except thatLiveJournal just inadvertently gave everyone reading Planet Debian aglaring example of why it's so important. (And Planet Debian is

I have an important message for web spider operators: our generosityis not unlimited. In fact, it's probably running out.

There are a lot of web spiders out there, and many of these spidersdon't seem to be offering anything for free to the public. When youcrawl to build a private index, you're building a business in part off our resources, which you are using for free, and there is verylittle in this for us. To put it plainly, such spider

Python calls the __len__ method on your objects to implement len() , and in a few other situations (for example, as one way ofiterating through the elements of a sequence-likeobject). Surprisingly, there's an under-documented restriction on whatyour __len__ can return: objects can't be larger than sys.maxint .

In fact, it's stricter than that: your __len__ method must returna literal integer. You

Today's excitement came from trying to bring a local network daemonfrontend up and running on a FreeBSD machine. It would spawn programswhen you connected to it, but they always exited immediately afterthey printed their greeting banner; it was as if they were seeing animmediate end of file.

FreeBSD's ktrace revealed that when the spawned programs went toread from standard input, they got an EAGAIN result. Fortunately I'vestubbed my toe on this one before: this is the exact symptom of yourstandard

Recently, Intel and AMD have been telling everyone who would listenthat single CPU performance is more or less all tapped out, and thatfuture improvements would come from various multi-* developments;multi-core, multi-processor, and so on. Ominous pronouncements haveemerged about how programmers need to bite the bullet and move to(highly) concurrent programming if they want their gravy train tocontinue.

When reading this sort of news coverage, it's worthwhile to rememberwhat sells CPUs and software. Namely:

Vernon Schryver, in news.admin.net-abuse.email:

Spam complaints must be viewed like complaints from your neighborsthat your children or other pets have again wrecked gardens. Spamcomplaints are evidence of failures, and should be exceptionsinstead of part of the main anti-spam machinery.

(From Message-ID <95cqle $80v$1@calcite.rhyolite.com> .)