For certain evil purposes last week, I assembled the old Saturn with a hard disk I found when cleaning a little while ago (I have that kind of tech stuff – you clean up and find 40GB disks – I’m pretty sure I have an 8.4 bumming around somewhere too).

I ended up being able to do the evil I needed to, but I could tell that the room was a bit warmer due to the extra box being alive. I was also lazy and couldn’t be bothered going downstairs for the D200, so this was shot with my old and trusty Coolpix 4500.

I used the box to be able to get remote access to a customers’ test setup to do some diagnosis on a bug (that’s notoriously hard to reproduce). I think I have a fair idea of what it is now though (timing related – not fun).

Remember kids, threads are evil.

Also, an interesting thing to note is that there is, in fact, a limit to not the number of fds you can pass to the select(2) system call, but to the actual number (on my Ubuntu box here, passing a fd of, say 2000 is probably going to lead to trouble). This has nothing to do with the previously mentioned bug, but an interesting point.