Truth in advertising

Seen in a recent spam:


Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2011 21:42:29 +0100
From: GREETINGS <legalexperts18@att.net>
Reply-To: [throwaway webmail address]
To: legalexperts18@att.net
Subject: PLEASE OPEN FILE1

THE ATTACHED FILE IS VIRUS, FEEL FREE OPEN FILE,
GET BACK TO FOR ME FOR DETIALS ABOUT YOUR PHILANTHROPIC FUND CLAIM AS
WRITTEN IN TH ATTACHED LETTER.

Thoughts on self-employment

The boss is a jerk, but you can't quit.

Snark du jour, ICANN edition

There's endless arguments about whether ICANN's long delayed (for about a decade) plan to permit large numbers of new top-level domains is a good idea.

The reason I am involved with ICANN is the blooming of a 1000 blooms

We all have our favorite metaphors, although in this case I think the swarming of a thousand blood-sucking insects is more apropos.

Snark du jour

An acquaintance asks about procmail, the mail sorting program that nerds have been using, almost unmodified, since 1990:

And why isn't there a WYSIWYG version of procmail if it is so good?

More or less the same reason you can't get training wheels for a Harley.

Book club: Nineteenth St NW, by Rex Ghosh

The first in an occasional series, with the occasion being that I finish reading a book.
Nineteenth Street NW, a financial thriller by Rex Ghosh, an economist at the IMF. There's a rule of thumb in the book biz that the cover blurbs on good books are reviews of the book by real reviewers, on so-so books are reviews of the author's previous books, and on bad books are by the author's friends. This book's blurbs are by Simon Johnson and Paul Volcker. Uh, oh.

A history of copy-on-write memory management

In virtual memory operating systems, copy on write (COW) is a well known technique to save time and space. The idea is that several processes have logically separate writable pages of data that happen to have the same contents, because they were initialized from the same source. So long as nobody writes into a page, all the processes can share the same copy. If a process does write into it, the operating system makes a separate copy of the the changed page. The best known application for COW is the Unix fork() primitive, although it also is useful for writable program data that is initialized from a file, a common situation in modern operating systems with shared libraries.

Can a state go bankrupt?

The Constitution says that the Congress can enact bankruptcy laws, but it doesn't say it can apply those laws to the states.