Paul Stenius

Tax season is approaching in the United States and like most people I am concerned about where my money will go. A few days ago the state of the union address was taking place and of course the hot topics these days are job creation and ways that united states can retain its position as the world superpower. While there has be a increase of unemployment recently, I am still very strongly against welfare hand out systems and I believe that if people cant find jobs on their own because there is a shortage, jobs need to be created that will benefit the people that are paying for them, IE the tax payers. As they say, there is always work to be done.

About 55 Years ago, Eisenhower dumped $25 Billion into creating interstate highways and this kind of investment has been paying off ever since. It created American jobs and has also benefited the people that paid for it. Because of it, our economy was strengthened and many people that would otherwise have been left out, were given opportunities they needed to get back on track.

While we still need to appropriate money into our road system, we now ...

Yesterday I was fooling around with python and trying to serve
some XML to a Cisco 7960 I have.  I spent a lot of time getting
my web server set up to serve a dynamic XML page which I could pop
my phone book information into and when I finally got it done it
wouldn't work.  Searching online I found out that the latest
firmwares from Cisco, 9.*, has a couple of bugs in it dealing with
XML.  Unfortunately I don't remember where I found this information
but I can give out the sparks notes on what I saw.

When I was served the page from a web server, if it responded
HTTP/1.0 OK, no good, the phone would only accept if it was
HTTP/1.1 .  I was getting some cryptic 404/BTXML errors but I could see
that the files were fine by loading it on to the production
server as a static file. Sure enough the phone was able to parse
it, so I actually moved the dynamic parts to the production
server to see if it would work as well.

After moving it, the phone can read it fine but I am ...

You are most likely used to using your computer to do something, and to do that, you need to run processes. While at this point you could have your computer launch a shell, you would still have a lot of setting up to do such as mounting hard drives, bringing up your network adapters, starting services, launching a GUI or what ever else you want to do. This is tedious and beyond the ability of most people so instead of running a shell the first process your computer runs is some kind of process manager. Traditionally this has been the init program which is the parent of every process that is executing.

Init is controlled by a handful of scripts that in turn ...