How we laughed when we discovered that Linux’s ping makes a reverse DNS lookup for every incoming ICMP echo reply! For added mirth and/or merriment, it also happens on flood-ping.
This is a rant I have made many times in person: far too many to count. Since I can't possibly warn everybody who might be affected by this, face to face, I'm hoping you will all spread the word.
The problem
To begin with, I should say that ls –color is useful. It can show you which […]
I asked an interviewee how long it takes for a disk seek, and he replied that he thought it was between 4 and 8 milliseconds. Speaking with colleagues, the conventional wisdom was that it was around 10 ms. I was unsatisfied so I thought I would try it for myself.
time sudo perl -we '$disk="/dev/sda"; $n=1500; […]
I was on a friend’s machine looking to copy some of his software.
$ dpkg-repack <pkg>
bash: dpkg-repack: command not found
So, here’s a hacky and woefully incomplete replacement for dpkg-repack.
#! /bin/sh
set -eu
[ 0 != $(id -u) ] && { echo "Must be run as (fake)root" 1>&2; exit 1; }
pkg=$1; pkgdir=$(mktemp -d "$pkg.XXXXXX")
mkdir "$pkgdir"
dpkg -L $pkg | tar […]
Independently from my decision to revisit Haskell, some colleagues here have just started a discussion group to learn the language. I hope I'll have time: I enjoyed my brief dalliance with it in 2003.
One of my Dublin colleagues has a copy of Thompson’s book, Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming so I'll steal that when […]
Some wonderful person (I can't believe it was me) made me a .initrc file for my work home directory. It contained one line:
set mark-directories off
I wouldn't press you to go out and copy me, for its effect is to stop tab-completion from putting the trailing / onto a completed directory name, so you have to […]
I occasionally like to pretend that I write in Scheme. It’s a language I very much admire. However, I tried the other day to write a reduce function in Scheme and was surprised and annoyed that certain language features were missing. I really miss pattern matching and partial application whenever I write Scheme. Maybe I […]
I have 8 and a half working days to go before I leave the IT Service!!!1!! Here’s the story so far…
<fx style="whizzy" title="five months ago" />
Google Recruiter
Come and work for us! Apply! Apply!
Me
No. I like Durham Just Too Much.
Recruiter
Aw, g'wan, g'wan, g'wan
Me
No.
Time passes
Recruiter
Thanks for the conference. Cheerio.
Me
Actually, I'd like to apply to work for you […]
I finally gave into the temptation to write a web-log that’s somewhat less antiquated than my old Advogato one.
A few notes about the infrastructure behind the blog. In the space of twenty minutes, I had Lighttpd, MySQL, PHP and Wordpress installed and configured.
daemontools
DJB’s daemontools software supervises djbdns, mysqld and lighttpd. If a daemon dies, daemontools […]