# Key Points from IRC Log (Oct 3, 2011)

* Discussion of XFS filesystem issues on Linux systems with large memory (16GB), highlighting problems with transaction handling and I/O barriers, with jrayhawk noting that removing sync calls from userspace improved performance on their system.

* Technical conversation about Unicode encoding issues in Python, specifically troubleshooting UTF-16 encoding variants (UTF-16-BE and UTF-16-LE) for proper text decoding of files with unusual character encoding.

* Brief mention of a MIT research article about analog systems biology, with commentary on the common problem of science news articles failing to link to the original research papers.

* Reference to a potential web service that would act as a "news2paper gateway" to connect news articles about scientific research to their original academic papers.

* Discussion of Thingiverse's weapons policy and potential legal issues with distributing weapon designs, with jrayhawk noting the risk of running afoul of ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations).

* Announcement that Bitbucket added Git support to their platform, which previously focused on Mercurial repositories.