More tales from vacationland...

Well that silly thing I started off with in my last entry is out. I'm not mourning it. A few more small changes for this morning's release of aewm as well, but what I'm really happy about is that I got a helpful response in comp.windows.x, and with the code I got there, I finally have a decent implementation of xaw-palette. I'm not going to release right away though, because it's not a bug fix, and I would like to test everything on my home machine. I just can't give it a workout on my laptop, what with no Netscape or net access for Mozilla. In the meantime, don't read the source. QOTD is: ``plan to throw one away; you will, anyway.''

Been having lots of network problems lately. First my campus's network starts dropping packets going in and out... getting up to 50% at times. I traceroute, find the problematic router, whois it, email the address given, email the address from the autobounce there, and do I get any thanks? :-P No, but AT&T did fix it this morning. The good part of all this is that craigbro offered me an account at red-bean.

Then, in the middle of that (last night), I somehow broke my home machine. I was logged in with PuTTY, and Windoze froze, so I restarted, redialed, and couldn't get back in. I could ping it, and it was still doing IP-masq fine, but no connections and (when I called home this morning) nothing on the screen. What did I learn from this?

1. I'm never going to be able to track this bug down, because I don't have access to a PPP-using Windoze machine at home.
2. Walking your parents through a manual fsck on the phone can be rather difficult. While I immediately know that ``fsck dev/hda3'' is wrong, to a newbie it's just a string of might-as-well-be-random characters. Also when fsck prints an entire screenfull of block bitmap differences and asks you if you want to fix them, it can scare mothers and impressionable children.

I like the latest article. Lots of good discussion. andreas: I belive the problem is that char can be signed. In that case, a negative value for len would pass the check, but then be cast to size_t (an unsigned type) in the call to strncpy. Assuming two's complement representation, it would then become something from 128-255 (for CHAR_BIT == 8 ;-)), and clobber your stack. I am unsure as to how the negative value gets into domain, though... Well anyway, am I close?

spot writes:

its like driving a car with only one thing on the dash, a little LED that says "engine: alive/dead".

You are Ken Thompson, and I claim your car. ;-)

Iain writes:

got 3.56 in C programming

Oh yeah, I forgot! I took that too. Got a 4.12. I'm sure the clc regulars would still be able to beat me though. I think it nets me a somewhat useless but still nifty "Master" certificate in my snailmail box when I get back home. Too busy/lazy to take any others at the moment... (p.s. I am the nth person to spell your name wrong the first time. Do'h.)

OK, that's the last edit I make in place. If someone else posts something I want to comment on, I'll just hold on to it. Can't go hogging the top of recentlog.html all day... :-)