Ralph S. Engelschall writes on FreeBSD’sUFS2 Snapshot Management Environment. This is really rather cool stuff for a filesystem in a production environment like at work.

Crhis Anderson answers Miguel de Icaza‘s concerns about Avalon. I’m very glad he does, and to have discussions like this in a public forum is great. I don’t totally buy the SVG and CSS both were passed on because they weren’t adaquate to meet our needs. I’ve heared this way to many times before as an excuse to reinvent the wheel and having to answer to no-one. Although it’s not embrace and extend we’re used to, I would have preferred them to implement standards correctly and then make additions through contributing to standard bodies like W3C.

Happy with FireFox? Good, then don’t read these two articles.

Russell Beattie sais it best regarding the iMac: My toddler would knock it over. Besdies, if this thing is going to be wall-mountable, all the wires are coming out the wrong way. And if it is not, it will look like a giant, unelegant octopus (my current imac has presently connected my stereo-system, backup-speakers, microphone, usb hub, negative film-scanner, TV breakout-box and keyboard, that’d fill all the slots in this next iMac and look rather unimpressive). It should have been simple: that one cable into the monitor should go to a little box that connects to all the cables. Break-out boxes are old news, but it works for hiding away the mess. Other oddities: No Firewire 800, slow FSB, default only 256MB RAM, still loving 80GB drives (two years ago I bought an iMac, and then the 80Gb drive that came along was small, what is this?), no DVD+RW, only DVD-R, Bluetooth not by default. I have heared nothing about WiFi, so I expect it’s there. And please don’t give me that built-in speaker “solution”.

In short: there have been many good proposals for the new iMac, this one was rather tame and has flaws that keep me from getting excited (apart from the G5 part). So my ideal solution right now would be a G5-based powerbook with an extra display.

An Introduction to HTTP Fingerprinting is a great article, and if you’re programming for the web (who isn’t these days? ) you should read it!