Gifts
Somebody nice bought me a DVD from my wishlist, I've been in a happy mood all week!
Financially it's something I could have bought it myself with no effort, and it wasn't a very expensive gift; I'm just feeling so pleased that somebody cared enough about my code/work to donate something.
Hacks
More work has been done on the Debian security audit project; I've gone over a few more packages and found a few small bugs. Nothing major at the moment.
It is depressing, though, how many times I've seen the same code in unrelated packages:
char path[MAXPATH];
...
strcpy( path, getenv("HOME" ) );
strcat( path, "/" );
strcat( path, ".foorc" );
I'm seriously beginning to blame this kind of error on the sample code which is so often displayed in books, and online - code which usually has a disclaimer in the introduction along the lines of "obviously you'd include error checking in your code - we've omitted it here to better demonstrate the principles we're discussing".
Never again would I purchase a book which contains this text, or its equivilent, in it's introduction.
I'm tempted to write a piece on testing software to destruction - which is something I enjoy...
SysAdmin
One of the higher up people in our company resigned on Friday, he had root on all our boxes - so there was a morning of frantically resetting passwords, checking for 'screen' sessions, and poring over crontab entries.
I don't think for a moment that he would do anything bad; but being careful protects us, and him.
I'm going to miss him over the coming days, and weeks .. if only because I have one less person to beat at gTetrinet