Tim's Bits and Pieces

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), the bane of the Linux "evangelist", is not restricted to anti-Linux materials: Iran Uses Novell and Microsoft Software to Make Bombs. Oh, noes! Microsoft and Novell must be evil!

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Slackware now has an official 64-bit port, so far it's only available for people who run -current, but be available as an alternative architecture for the next release (Slackware 13). Whoo!

As promised here's my review of NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, my current web host.

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For your reading pleasure may I present A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

You'll notice I'm posting late again, for which I blame C.S. Lewis, and since he's dead he can't defend himself from this unfounded accusation completely serious and non-trivial explanation for my tardiness.

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Since I missed posting over the weekend I thought I'd share a little Linux one-liner that I found amusing. For those that don't know "load" in the Unix world often refers to the system load averages for one, five, or fifteen minutes. The system load average is the average number of processes in the "ready" state over the period in question. Processes in the "ready" state are normally waiting for a chance to use the CPU, but it also includes processes waiting for I/O, which the following one-liner takes advantage of to cause an artificial load spike:

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Tuesday's still the weekend right? ;-)

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Oops, completely missed posting last weekend, mostly just because I'm too easily distracted. Such is life, hopefully I'll do two or three posts this weekend to even it up.

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My Slackware laptop had decently fast boot times (a little over a minute), but I'm impatient and decided to see if I could speed it up some more. Here's the changes I made and the results down the bottom. This is on a Dell Vostro 1510, with 4GB of ram and a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo. Obviously the results will vary depending on your hardware.

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About a fortnight ago my GMail account started giving me weird errors when I tried to login via POP3; the error I was receiving was something similar to "-ERR [SYS/TEMP] Proxying required. {XDH}".

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