Older blog entries for Fefe (starting at number 2)

Defcon was quite cool.

I got the impression that Americans have an alcohol problem, though. People went way overboard at Defcon, as though they were not permitted to drink at home.

And people in the US apparently earn way too much money. Everyone acted like he was the Chosen One. But it was very funny nonetheless. The friend who travelled with me even won a Sparc IPX. We were quite worried how the airport security people would react (they normally want you to "switch it on" before their eyes).

I visited Usenix Security, too, and I was impressed by the quality of the papers and talks there.

I decided to go to Defcon this year. Finally.

For some 7 years I wanted to go there but never got around to, but this year I am not going to delay it any more. And I will go to the Usenix security symposium. I am quite happy now ;-)

On a side note, I changed my ucspi-tcp IPv6 patch to add the man pages from an earlier version of ucspi-tcp that djb removed for some reason that I don't comprehend. The web is great for a lot of stuff, but it should not be the only source of documentation and the documentation should always also be included with the software package so you can put it on a floppy disk or tape and install it on some standalone machine somewhere remote.

And why do people use info to document smaller packages? Info is great for large monster projects like glibc and gcc, but come one, glibc should come with man pages! Currently, Linux users have to get the man pages from a different source than the libc thus leading to incomplete and partly even wrong documentation coverage.

glibc stinks. How can it be that statically linking an empty program creates a binary of over 200k size (after stripping)?! I don't get it.

Fortunately, reading the libc sources is quite instructive (I would say the libc 5 sources are easier to read), and so I started a new project today: diet libc. It just contains the bare minimum you need to link a typical libdjb program, i.e. the system call wrappers and malloc() and friends. There was some almost usable source code from Red Hat that I extended and ported to the glibc headers, and I included some malloc code from 1998 that I found on my machine from someone else. Isn't free software great? ;-)

Anyway, using that diet libc, I was able to make a 3k statically linked sln. The one from glibc is 800k on my machine. Why? Because glibc doesn't strip the binaries it installs. Ulrich Drepper thinks that disk space is not important. Well, to him, maybe.

Also, I released my ncp/npush/npoll rewrite using libdjb today. This code spreads like wildfire. Almost all unix users I know personally already use it. You might want to have a look at it, too.