The fact that we manage the switches in our data centres differently than any other server is patently absurd, but we do so because we want to harness the power of a tiny bit of silicon which happens to be able to dramatically speed up the switching bandwidth. beware of proprietary silicon, it’s absurd! That tiny bit of silicon is known as an ASIC,...

The discipline of collecting infrastructure & application performance metrics, aggregation, storage, visualizations and alerting has many terms associated with it... Telemetry. Insights engineering. Operational visibility. I've seen a bunch of people present their work in advancing the state of the art in this domain: from Anton Lebedevich's statistics...

I use the Evolution mail client. It does have a few annoying bugs, but it has a plethora of great features too! Hopefully this post will inspire you to help hack on this piece of software and fix the bugs! Mailing list etiquette: When replying to mailing lists, it’s typically very friendly to include the email address of the person you’re replying to...

Recently, when I tried to access http://slashdot.org/ in Firefox, I would see my browser title bar flash briefly to “AT&T GUI”, and then I would get redirected to: http://slashdot.org/cgi-bin/redirect.ha which returns slashdot’s custom error 404 page! What is going on? (Read on for answer…) Did slashdot mess up their mod_rewrite config? (Nope, works...

(this is also posted on O’Reilly’s Radar blog) Before I begin this post, let me say that this is intended to be a critique of the Five Whys method, not a criticism of the people who are in favor of using it. This critique I present is hardly original; most of this post is inspired by Todd Conklin, Sidney Dekker, and Nancy Leveson. The concept of post-hoc...

I’ve wanted a feature in Evolution for a while. It was formally requested in 2002, and it just recently got fixed in git master. I only started publicly groaning about this missing feature in 2013, and mcrha finally patched it. I tested the feature and found a small bug, mcrha patched that too, and I finally re-tested it. Now I’m blogging about this...