Cox Crow

Big Sister Helps

So, the new one cried in the middle of the night. Her big sister woke up, and called out

Don't worry, Baby, I'm coming!

When we checked on the Big Sister, she was sitting in her bed, putting her shoes on.

4:02:24 PM # Google It!
categories: Family

Uh-oh. Marc Barrot is starting to blog sysadmin stuff.

A Visit To Amanda. Æleen Frisch: Top Five Open Source Packages for System Administrators - Number 5 [in O'Reilly Network's Newsletter]. [s l a m]

3:51:01 PM #

Big Customers are Valued Customers

Let me talk to my buddies on those other systems or else. [ via Foop Blog]

Let's hope we don't end up with termination fees.

3:32:21 PM # Google It!
categories: Messaging

What's News?

Something happened. This is the thing. More information on the thing here.

It's news to me when the list of allocated IP addresses changes. Some other things have to be updated when that happens, most of them more promptly than others.

When we syndicate our websites with RSS files, we're passing messages around over HTTP, though the transport could just as easily be Jabber, NNTP, or SMTP. RSS is just one message format among many, that's more or less easily machine-readable. In the process, we're recreating change notification, message queues, and parent-child relationships, because existing mechanisms have too much overhead to meet our needs.

When I was at AP, we needed a way to accept updated scores from the Olympics. One of the elements of the contraption that eventually went into production was a mailbox on a Linux host. The scores, in an IOC-speficied format, were mailed to this address, where the MIME encoding was removed, the messages were parsed, and the data inserted into a database — from which the data was released over the wire.

1:37:13 PM # Google It!
categories: Messaging, Writing Online

Republic vs. Empire

Jerry Pournelle has been characterizing the current political climate as being a struggle between Republic and Empire since Day One. He looks at the rising tide of war in the same light.

11:43:11 AM # Google It!
categories: Politics