stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley


	Blathering for Sunday, 23 March 2008 09:57: "Gary Kildall and the company he founded to sell CP/M, Intergalactic Digital Research, soon became very wealthy. It turned out that a lot of microcomputer companies needed an operating system, and Gary had designed it in a way that separated all the computer-specific bits (called the BIOS) from the rest of the OS. Kildall also did this out of laziness because he didn't want to keep rewriting the whole of CP/M for every new computer. The moral of this story is that being lazy can sometimes be a spectacularly smart thing." 09:57: Intergalactic Digital Research is a great company name... 09:58: From BFS to ZFS: past, present, and future of file systems 22:33: I hate how some stores in the US demand to see a receipt for the stuff you just bought. The main offenders seem to be Frys and Costco. Unfortunately these searches are legal, which just makes them more annoying. Tags for this post: blather() posted at: 15:33 \| path: /blather \| permanent link to this entry There are no comments on this post which have survived moderation. 8 posts have been culled and 0 blocked. Be the first to make a non-spam comment here, please!


	The Internet is a strange place As mentioned previously, I've been downloading HTTP pages as part of my survey of Internet mail servers in order to detect domain parking behaviour. I should have thought a bit harder about that code though, because the implementation is a bit naive. Specifically, the code downloads the source of the web page (to RAM), and then base64 encodes it (to RAM), and finally writes it to the log file. That means that there is a little bit more than two copies of a given page's source in RAM before the operation is complete. However, it hadn't occurred to me that sites such as http://sixela.com/ would exist. That URL results in an endless stream of the word "blah". It took me three worker deaths before I had figured out what the problem was, mainly because when workers use to much RAM their slice is killed, and often the log files are lost. So the moral of this tale? Don't trust the Internets. Tags for this post: research() posted at: 07:14 \| path: /research \| permanent link to this entry There are 1 comments on this post, and 5 comments which didn't survive moderation. 0 were blocked by trained gerbils. Click here to see them.