SIGPIPE

I was changing a send call to a writev and ran into an annoying problem. On the send call I had set the MSG_NOSIGNAL flag to stop any SIGPIPE signals if the socket I was writing to was closed, unfortunately I cannot set the same flag on writev! (I had originally switched from using write to send to be able to set the flag) On some systems (BSD) you can set the socket option SO_NOSIGPIPE to get a similar effect, but on Linux it doesn't look like this option is supported. The other option is to set the system to ignore a SIGPIPE, but there are issues with this if you do it naively, see Suppressing SIGPIPE in a library.

iphones and people

I have noticed the number of iphones increasing among the people I know. It is particularly interesting is that a lot of people who are non-geeks now have iphones, this is because the iphone is now available on cheaper mobile plans; the geeks were prepared to pay the premium to get the iphone early. I know of one person who now reads their e-mail because they have an iphone, previously they were too busy to sit down at a computer. This means that the iphone is actually increasing the number of people who are actively using the internet and the WWW!