Blargh

gettimeofday() and time() should only be used to get the current time if the current wall-clock time is actually what you want. They should never be used to measure time or schedule an event X time into the future. What's the problem? gettimeofday() returns the current wall clock time and timezone. time() returns a subset of this info (only whole seconds, and not timezone). Using these functions in order to measure the passage of time (how long an operation took) therefore seems like a no-brainer. After all, in real life you measure by checking your watch before and after the operation. The differences are: 1. Nobody sneaks in and changes your wristwatch when you're not looking You usually aren't running NTP on your wristwatch, so it probably won't jump a second or two (or 15 minutes) in a random direction because it happened to sync up against a proper clock at that point. Good NTP implementations try to not make...

I'm writing a BGP daemon in Erlang . It can connect, parse update packets and announce routes. I started up an old Cisco 2620 router and sent route announcement to it until it cried: %SYS-2-MALLOCFAIL: Memory allocation of 65536 bytes failed from 0x8046F3C8, Pool: Processor Free: 79840 Cause: Memory fragmentation Alternate Pool: None Free: 0 Cause: No Alternate pool -Process= "BGP Router", ipl= 0, pid= 84 -Traceback= 804733A4 804754C8 8046F3CC 80851CDC 8081C7D8 80832848 80832F3C 8 %BGP-5-ADJCHANGE: neighbor 172.16.x.x Down No memory Muhahahaha! The program: git clone git://github.com/ThomasHabets/eggpd.git Update later that night I flooded the 2620 again for a few minutes and then disconnected the peer. It stopped responding. Well almost. It answers to ping (17 % packet loss), and my existing telnet session seems to be working somewhat, although there is a delay of about 10 minutes between ...

In what top scientists are calling "pretty gay", Solaris can't handle disks that used to have non-solaris stuff on them without being wiped first. I thought only the windows installer borked if the partition table looked weird, but no! The installer could not see the disk, and I was dropped into a dtterm where I had to do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsk/c0t0d0 bs=1048576 and reboot. So... wipe the disk before trying to install Solaris.