Letters

I recently built a little web application that quickly became production. So quickly in fact, it was only running on the PC running Linux that I used in development. It became the only Linux server in our otherwise all-Windows data center. That was last October. I never did see a new server, but the application just stayed up and worked. Then last Friday, it suddenly went dark. After being yelled at for how unreliable my “toy” was, I finally got one of our Windows Network “Engineers” to admit, “Well, we saw that box running in the data center, but because no one had touched it in months, we figured no one was using it.” I guess I'll call them to reboot it for me every now and then just so they know it's still in use.

—Michael K. Martin, DVM, MPH

I just want to let you know that I have been getting LJ for the past few years. It is a wonderful magazine, and I enjoy reading it every month. My son, who is ten years old, has started to read LJ, and he finds it enjoyable to read as well.

—Jim Wininger

I enjoyed the article about signals [“Linux Signals for the Application Programmer” by Dr B. Thangaraju, LJ, March 2003], but let me point a small omission. Listing 4 (page 48) needs to #include <errno.h> in order to compile.

—Paul

Here's a picture of me and Jon “maddog” Hall at the October 2002 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) chapter meeting at Northeastern University in Boston. We especially appreciate his regular appearances at our meetings and his colorful and insightful commentary on the future of Linux worldwide. It's through our exposure to people like him that we can form open minds and think for ourselves instead of being led by one company's vision.

—Cathy Swenton, College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

I work at a US Navy hospital in Naples, Italy. Recently, my Cisco 7507 inner security screening router died. Then the next week, my core switch. I had to piece together three Linux boxes quickly to use as routers to get through this problem. We are still running on two Linux routers, because my core switch hasn't recovered yet.

—Lee Randolph, CCNP

rsync [“rsync, Part I” by Mick Bauer, LJ, March 2003] is a wonderful tool, but if you want file synchronization, you may not even need to invoke it explicitly. The excellent file synchronization program Unison (www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison) also uses the rsync algorithm.

—Ben Crowell

After reading your comments about spam in the March 2003 issue [From the Editor], I wanted to make a comment of my own. We already have laws that would deal with the jerks who spam. The theft of bandwidth and nuisance could be dealt with through criminal charges, if the government would get off their backsides and enforce the laws we already have.

—Craig Sparks

I do not know the details behind the decision to downgrade David A. Bandel's Focus on Software column to the Upfront section of LJ, but I see it as a definite loss. Reading Mr. Bandel's column every month was one of the highlights of my subscription.

—Raymond Moczynski

BlogMax is a blog package that's based entirely upon Emacs. It works with both Emacs and XEmacs, is easily extensible and runs on several platforms (billstclair.com/blogmax/index.html). All that is required is a working install of Emacs or XEmacs and access to your web site files via FTP.

—Shane Simmons

I'd really like to suggest that LJ look into printing information on the Slackware distribution. I've been a Linux user and flag bearer since 1994 when I first installed Slackware; since then I've installed many different distributions of Linux and versions of UNIX. I always come back to Slackware due to its consistency, stability and well-thought-out development. I feel that Slackware has earned a bad reputation as being either dead or underdeveloped, neither of which could be further from the truth! I urge you to please consider an in-depth article on the status and beauty of Slackware.

—David Fleason