The other day a weblog I read had a post (and their RSS feed) blow up because of invalid markup: an entry wasquoting some text that had bare '<'s in it, nothing escaped them, andinvalid HTML tags got generated and ate part of the entry. (Theproblem's now been fixed.)

There's nothing noteworthy about this, and that's the problem: peoplemake this mistake all the time. HTML has a bunch of picky rules tokeep track of

Here's a surprising reason to have a really large RAID stripe size: toreduce per-spindle IO loads for random IO.

How and why this works is going to take some explanation. First,modern disks read and write very fast; what costs time isseeks. Random IO means lots of seeks. In random IO on a striped RAID,this means that any time you have to touch a new disk you pay anadditional seek cost. And you switch disks every time you cross astripe boundary.

Presented in point form, because the illustrated form is too verbose:

• The subdomain bos.netsolhost.com has nameserversNS1.bos.netsolhost.com and NS2.bos.netsolhost.com.
• according to the nameservers for netsolhost.com, these have IPaddresses 205.178.146.11 and 205.178.146.12 respectively.
• according to 205.178.146.11

One of the machines I help look after is an open, read-only Usenetserver (details here ; the openaccess is a 'because we can' thing). You might be surprised to knowthat the server logs only minimal information about NNTP sessions, andthis is a deliberate action that required hacking the software a bit.

When I was setting up the machine and planning open access foreveryone on campus, I found myself thinking about how I'd feel if, forexample, some day a department

Here's a little bit of magic, demonstrated in the Python interpreter:

>>> from record import Record>>> r = Record()>>> r2 = r.a.b('abc').c>>> print r2a.b('abc').c>>> print r.d.e(r2, t=20).f()d.e(Record().a.b('abc

One of the things that makes universities such peculiar computing environments is grant funding.

The straightforward effect is to inject uncertainty into the year toyear budgeting process, since few grants have a sure renewal. Evenwhen the total amount of grant funding stays more or less the same,who gets it (and thus what projects are funded) can vary a lot, withthe attendant localized lurches. (The uncertainty of grant money maybe one reason that people are often far more willing to pay forequipment and consulting than to

The usual explanation of how network interfaces get their names isthat they're named based on what's in /etc/modprobe.conf ( /etc/modules.conf if you're still running a 2.4 series kernel).You'll have lines like:

alias eth0 sk98linalias eth1 3c59xalias eth2 e100

And indeed this usually works, and when your system boots nicely the3Com 'Marvell' gigabit card is eth

I was somewhat surprised to read in Chris Linfoot's blog that he uses SORBS ,because I've always considered the top-level dnsbl.sorbs.net blocklist a little too aggressive. (Considering that I use SPEWS,this may be a little bit of throwing rocks in glass houses.)

(Update: Chris Linfoot does say that you need a goodwhitelist to use SORBS.)

Out of curiosity I decided to get a very broad sense of the potential'false positive' rate for using dnsbl.

It's time for the first weekly spam summary of the new year, so let'ssee what sort of a start 2006 is off to.

This week we received 14,639 email messages from 198 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 30,023 sessions from 3,122different IP addresses. Message volume is up some since last week (not surprising with peoplecoming back to work) and session volume is holding steady.

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