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When Linux sucks, it sucks more than anything else. | |
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Date: 14/10/2003 | Did you know that popen wasn't thread safe?
Yeah well it ain't. So those nice little 3 liners (popen, fgets, pclose) now turn into a pipe, fork, dup, close, exec, waitpid, hndstate mess. Of course put it in a function and forget about it. But why? Why not fix the function! It's not the '90s anymore people, where Linux is just for uni students with too much time on their hands. Btw gdb 6.0 is out. And it fails nicely when you call fork in a program linked to pthreads (not even calling pthreads yet). However with gdb 5.3 you can call fork, exec etc and it all works but popen is still poison. So now I have the joy of hunting through LGI and removing all calls to popen so that things "Just Work (tm)". |
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The Evilness of W32.Swen | |||||
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Date: 11/10/2003 | Despite the rather excellent virus protection in Scribe my dad got swen'd. Simply because it was a convincing enough email pitch (using real microsoft.com graphics and HTML layout) to cause him to save the exe out and run it, despite the explicit warning about virii when he tried double clicking the attachment.
It's some sort of mark of acheivement for a developer when your own parents (esp. non-technical) happily use your software from day to day. Anyway, so their laptop was swen'd and it was my job (of course) to unswen it. So I tried the usual things: So I needed to transfer the virus remover to the laptop, which was where the fun really began. You see their aging laptop has no network of any kind, so I'm reduced to removable media or a laplink type arrangement. Firstly I no longer have a floppy in my box so I pulled out the laplink cable and plugged it in. A long time ago I wrote "i.Share", a simple laplink style app to transfer files over a parallel port link. So I fired that up on the laptop and went across to my machine to fire up the other local copy. But there was no local copy, I had somehow misplaced it and no amount of searching through old archives was to yeild a working copy. So I started rewriting the core parts of the application and sending a file from the laptop to the desktop and decoding the simple wire protocol. Then I remembered that the source code was on the laptop as well! Duh, I had it there to test that side of it when I was originally writing the code. So I retyped by hand the receive file function into the desktop and ran it. Then I sent the source code over this make shift link, and thus restoring the desktop copy to it's original glory. Me thinks a better backup stratagy is needed. Anyway I think that some more severe anti-exe attachment code is needed in Scribe. Something along the lines of an option to "Delete executable attachments on sight!" type thing to really make absolutely sure that you can't infect yourself. Scorch that earth! (0) Comments | Add Comment | |
Lgi Intergrated Developement Environment | |||
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Date: 3/10/2003 |
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"Help I've Fallen And I Can't ShutDown" | |
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Date: 12/9/2003 | What is it with computers and switching off?
My Windows install has developed a case of shutdownitis, and Linux tells me to "Power Off Now". Thanks... Linux... yeah real great, why don't I manually help you to switch off. I kinda expect Windows to Suck(tm), but I don't know what the deal is with Linux. This is like the new millenium right? Where things "Just Work"? |
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Bayesian Filtering | |
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Date: 9/9/2003 | The most recent release of Scribe has a new feature which you may have heard of: Bayesian Filtering. Which in a nutshell uses word count statistics to classify email into different groups. This idea has been sweeping the mail filtering industry by storm since Paul Graham published his Plan For Spam.
For my own sanity (I get 40+ spam a day) I decided Scribe needed better filtering, and Bayesian represents the best technology at the moment. So I've been testing my implementation of Bayesian Filtering for the last few weeks and it's working really well. You may have even noticed it in the filters menu of the last few test builds. If you want to know about how to set it up click "more". |
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Mozilla meet Scribe, Scribe... Mozilla | |
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Date: 4/9/2003 | It seems after many months of "mailto: is not a registered protocol" I've finally managed to beat Mozilla [Linux] into submission and get it to open Scribe to send an email.
This 'wizardry' was accomplished with MozEx, an extension for Mozilla (why it's an extension and not PART of the application I don't know). Anyway, with a non-user friendly command like: /.../Scribe/scribe -m "%a" -c "%c" -s "%s"MozEx will pass all the parameters of the mailto: link down to Scribe, where with some newly written shared memory black magic it passes the arguments to the running instance of Scribe and up comes the compose window with all the arguments in the right place. Ahhh, Genki! |
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