War

I'm not sure what to say. It's nasty, Iraq is proving many of the assertions about them to be true. They are grossly violation Geneva convention by placing bounties on the heads of their enemies and showing POWs on TV. They launched scud missles which are considered WMD and then the fake surrendering and other perfidy is disgusting. I hope it ends soon. I think there are lines that shouldn't be crossed, ever; I think it is imparitive that we never give in to terrorists or their tactics like this. I can't imagine how you possibly justify their actions. I pray for peace soon. No more from me on this.

Builds

I'm a big fan of a clean build. At IBM once I worked on a huge project that had a perl script that built the makefile and then ran make. It was insanely complex and some dirt bag coded himself some job security with it. Adding or removing files was impossible without this guys help, I added a single cpp file once and it was broke for 2 days, you simply couldn't add a file to the list of files to compile. Currently debugging the same problem I've debugged at every other job. Some jackass puts a "perl necklace" (pardon the sick humor, but it is the best description I've ever heard for a 1000+ line undocumented piece of mission critical perl) on the build and we make a few changes and the build stops working. NEVER DO THAT! EVER! I honestly haven't run into something you couldn't do with GNU make, it might take a little script but it's always possible. ant and a-a-p do some nice stuff for you too. Bottom line: don't make the build too complex, don't have too many system deps for it, and don't leave it undocumented... I think this might be my biggest pet peeve, I think you should be fired for doing stuff like that.

Open Source Sabotage

Then last night I debugged another, very interesting bug. It was an intentional one. An opensource project, that I won't name yet, intentionally pushed out sabotaged code. There website had a redirect, if you downloaded it from some computers you'd get the bad code, if you downloaded it from others you'd get clean code. I was shocked that someone would put the time and effort in to something like that. Upon closer inspection they had some embedded messages in the software that were hidden behind a simple XOR-esque encryption and made to look like data strings. When you run the software you get a little nastigram about how you've been black listed. Any comments on the best way to deal with this with in the community? I'm inclined to start a fork. Anyone know of other cases of this? They didn't drop our IPs, they didn't contact our ISP or admins about anything, they intentionally sabotaged the download.