'The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a 'covenant not to sue' going forward, which will help protect the database from future baseless legal actions and disruptions.

Software engineers around the world depend on the time zone database to make sure that time-stamps for email and other files work correctly no matter where you are. However, last September, Astrolabe filed a lawsuit against Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert – the researchers who coordinated the database's development for decades – because the database includes information from an atlas in which Astrolabe claimed to own copyright. But facts – like what time the sun rises – are not copyrightable. EFF, along with co-counsel Adam Kessel and Olivia Nguyen at the Boston office of Fish & Richardson P.C, promptly signed on to defend Olson and Eggert and protect this essential tool. In January, EFF advised Astrolabe that Olson and Eggert would move for sanctions if Astrolabe did not withdraw its complaint. Today's dismissal followed.'

'vmtouch is a tool for learning about and controlling the file system cache of unix and unix-like systems. It is BSD licensed.'

as seen in their "Instagram Engineering" post

'Tcprstat is a free, open-source TCP analysis tool that watches network traffic and computes the delay between requests and responses. From this it derives response-time statistics and prints them out.' Computes percentiles, too

from Basho, via istvan. DTrace is becoming more compelling as a deep instrumentation/monitoring API -- I didn't realise disabled DTrace probes were virtually 0-overhead (a "2 NOOP instruction placeholder", apparently), that's nifty. Wonder if they've fixed the licensing mess, though

'git checkout -t' alone is worth the bookmark

with picture. WAAAAAANT despite the sheer massive impracticality of it. I still love VT*20 terminals....

'Connected to TELEHACK port 13 / It is 8:16 am on Saturday, April 30, 2011 in Mountain View, California, USA. There are 10 local users. There are 24139 hosts on the network.' via Waxy

these are great - some new ones on me!

a nifty gdb hack; essentially dup()s a couple of files in /tmp in place of fd 1 and 2, then uses the bashism "detach" to nohup the running process

another concurrency shell command; interesting approach to dashboarding the results, with the "mdm.screen" utility provided

by Ole Tange. pretty extensive, if inscrutable (via Tony Finch)

wraps strace(1) to summarise and aggregate I/O ops performed by a Linux process. looks pretty nifty (via Jeremy Zawodny)

some interesting tips; even handy for a seasoned vimmer like myself. I like the idea of remapping ";" to ":" to save 2 keystrokes

'a growing collection of the Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago, when Unix was young.' these are really, really nifty (via popey)

15% smaller than bzip, 30% smaller than gzip, and now shipped with Fedora and Ubuntu. uses LZMA2

new Ruby HTTP server, using a preforked process pool based on select(). Github like it because of failure-recovery problems with Ruby threading bugs in Mongrel. The preforking algo used is extremely rudimentary -- the kind of thing we used in SpamAssassin before I implemented Apache-style preforking in 3.0

it's not sufficiently evenly-distributed, apparently. Also: got linked from Hack The Planet!

how to keep a small number of user accounts (ie. root) delivering locally while the rest are delivered to a smarthost

Ben C-S rejigs the legendary "ed, man! !man ed" net.humor for a new age of DVCSes

'File-based, rather than tuple-based processing'; based around UNIX command-line toolset; good UNIXish UI; lots of caching of intermediate results; low setup overhead -- although it does require a shared POSIX filesystem, e.g. NFS, for synchronization

well-written, and it's good to see version control listed right at the top of the list. But quite dead; interesting for historical reasons only at this stage