Here's an important Linux kernel configuration tip: always compile NATfor your kernels, whether built in or as modules.

I often build my own kernels on machines (usually so I can use stock kernel.org kernels). Some of these machinesare slow, and in general I like to leave out options I don't need. Inthe past, I have often looked at NAT and decided that I clearly wasn'tgoing to need it. (After all, none of these machines were going

This week we received 12,079 email messages from 226 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 44,167 sessions from 4,794 differentIP addresses. Session volume is up a bit compared to last week , but well within what I nowconsider normal fluctuations.

Because we rebooted this machine Monday evening, we're about 36 hoursshort on kernel-level and total connection volume stats (and I'm notgoing to bother with per-day

Dear Internet marketers: affiliate marketing schemes that pay money are dead, killed by spammers. Please get overit and find a marketing technique that doesn't cause spam and attractspammers. (And if you are actually a spammer hiding behind'affiliates', sorry, no one believes that any more.)

Affiliate marketing pays people for traffic. When people are beingpaid for traffic, spamming becomes the most cost effective way ofgenerating it. So people spam. Anyone who opens their eyes can seethis all over

The If-Modified-Since header in HTTP requests is used as one way ofdoing 'conditional GET' requests, where the web server can give you anice bandwidth-saving '304' response if the URL hasn't changed sincethe version you already have. In theory the header has an arbitrarytimestamp and the server will 304 the request unless the page haschanged since that time.

In practice, the HTTP RFC strongly recommends that clients treat thevalue as a magic cookie, just

For reasons outlined in CPANProblem , I don't installPython packages using their setup tools; I build them into RPMs andinstall the RPMs. Python's distutils (the setup system used by mostPython packages) have a command to do this, called bdist_rpm , butit has some issues that have caused me to become quite familiar withits inner workings.

bdist_rpm works in the following steps:

1. use the distutils sdist command to create a source tarball.
2. write an RPM specfile.
3. create a local

I recently realized something: databases are APIs .

Just like library functions and classes with defined methods, thecolumns and tables and inter-table relationships in your databases areeffectively a collective API to the database. (As distinct fromthe APIs used to talk to the database program, ranging through ODBC toSQL.)

If you have what Martin Fowler calls an application database ,used only inside one application, you have an internal API, just likea module's interface or a class's methods. But if

(The following example is a simplified and modified version of anonline discussion I had recently. All errors are my fault.)

Here's an example large database problem; it's simplest to cast thisas a customer support system that you sell to big companies.

In your first version, the customer support application databasesystem includes a table of companies that are being supported.

Multiple groups write various programs against this database, and inpart against this table and other tables hooked to it (such as peoplewho

It's nice when everything works like it's supposed to; the mostexcitement we had today was swapping in a replacement drive in thisserver. (I like Mondays for this sort of thing, since I'll be in theoffice for the next four days in case problems come up.)

The old IDE disk needed replacement because it was starting to remindus that it was consumer electronics by flaking out on seeks underheavy IO load every so often (hopefully it was the drive and not thecabling

There are only a few popular search engines at anytime. They are doing you a favour by indexing you, because you needtheir users far more than they need your content. You are are doingeveryone else a favour by letting them index you , since they needcontent (yours included) to attract users.

When people are doing you a favour, it's worthwhile to go out of yourway to help them out.

When you are doing search engines the favour, it's their job to go