Semaphores

In the style of The Profound Programmer, I present the following:

[text:  "Perhaps you should have somebody on your development team that understands how to use semaphores and other synchronization primitives", photograph reminds people that in some systems, a system failure is a lot more inconvenient than simply having to restart]


Image credit:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/4011428942/


If you buy me beer I might even tell you how I got the inspiration for this creation.  Let's just say that my inspiration came from code I looked at a long time ago.

The VLAN Koan

I wrote the following parody/koan one day to help a tech-writer friend of mine understand VLANS. He liked it. I hope you do too.

Goso said: ``When a packet goes out of its egress to the edge of the abyss, its header and its payload all pass through, but why can't the VLAN tag also pass?''

Kevin's comment: If anyone can open one eye at this point and say a word of layer-2 bridging, he or she is qualified to discuss the intricacies of ``one-armed routers'', and, not only that, he or she can save all sentient beings under them from broadcast storms caused by Windoze boxen. But if he or she cannot say such a word of true IEEE 802.1Q VLANs, he or she should turn back to their tag.

If the packet is transmitted, it will fall into the ether;
If it remains in the queue, it will exceed its TTL,
That little VLAN tag
Is a very strange thing.

(apologies to Mumon... (-: )

A DIALOGUE WITH SARAH, AGED 3: IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT IF YOUR DAD IS A CHEMISTRY PROFESSOR, ASKING “WHY” CAN BE DANGEROUS

Can you say ‘hydrophilic’?