Jean those are Mummys Gloves! (by sarah)

Jean loves my furry white gloves - she keeps stealing them!

The Only trouble is she looks like a fluffy lobster with them on!

Fleas my fault (by sarah)

I am an idiot - I washed the cats flea collors!

doh doh doh.

And Minni's been having her treatments becuase she doesn't have a collar!

Fleas (by sarah)

'Alaric when did the cats last have their flea treatment?'

'Erm, can't remember why?'

'Becuase I am covered in flea bits! Havent found any on Jean. Didnt you mark it in the calender?'

'Oh dear, no why should I have?'

'Yes its supposed to be done every three months isnt it?'

'Oh no we only ever did it when they got fleas...' I will not type what I said yet as it would be lots of stars! Approximatly it was along the lines of...

'Nonononon... we have a baby we dont let the cats get fleas in the first place! Same with the worming tablets.'

....

'You haven't given them their worming treatment either have you?'

'But they dont have worms...'

Ok so I had three flea bits but still - I'm afriad poor Al got moaned at quiet alot as he'd said he would do the cats meds as he's brought cats up before.

Good job I'm already in the middle of spring cleaning!

Wiggly Pets and Shrooms (by sarah)

I ment to post this ages ago but forgot about it!

Here are some wiggly pets investigating Mushrooms and Fungi of various sorts!

I'm afraid that maggots came out of this and due to Sarahs maggot phobia Al disappeared it rather than any culnary goodness coming of it.

System V IPC on Mac OS X is a bit funny (by alaric)

Well, at long last, I'm finally getting paid to mess around with the kinds of things I find REALLY interesting - a task which, at the moment, involves setting up shared memory and semaphores between processes for some high-speed shared cache action. Sort of like PostgreSQL does.

Anyway, I've found a few quirks of Mac OS X's System V IPC setup that I thought I'd best share.

1. ipcs should be setuid or setgid or something. It grovels in kernel memory to find out what IPC objects exist and their state, but when run as a normal user, it doesn't have permissions to do so and fails silently; ipcs always returns that nothing's allocated, while ipcs -T reports garbage values.

2. Talking of ipcs -T, the IPC system limits are (as usual) set via sysctls. But if you try and change them, they refuse to alter. It turns out that you can set them, but only once - the first time this set of sysctls is written to the kernel, it sets up its internal data structures and considers the sysctls read-only thereafter until the next boot.

You have been warned.

I'm reporting the former at least to Apple as a bug...