It makes me sad to hear all the Danes doing Danish things. Here I am a Dane (50%, with 25% Icelandic, and 25% Misc. Canadian) two generations removed. My dad (100%) speaks the lingo, but other than counting to ten and calling my sister a frog I'm out of luck. Oh, when Christmas comes I might manage "Merry Christmas".

I came away from my Java project with some unstructured ideas about what I liked and didn't like about Java .. what I liked and didn't like about software development for that matter. Recently I sprung for a book that is helping me put it in perspective, Component Software - Beyond Object-Oriented Programming. A good discussion (441 rather dense pages) about what might make seperately deliverable software componets work. (As a subtext, I wonder if Microsoft is on to something when they hire these guys.)

doobee says:

Reading people talk about Unix sucks; StarOffice to be free send my emotions quite high. Tey try to make Unix something different.

I think UNIX has a lot of obvious strengths. Beyond the technical strength of many small programs all the same, UNIX is an ecosystem. In an other environment, someone might propose an integrated solution of the packaging/library/language problem ... but it would likely be offred as the solution. If it is wrong, the whole ship sinks. In UNIX people are trying everything, and they all have to fail for the ship to sink.

I guess we should be a bit patient, and take a look around at what people are doing. Some people might have solutions that work within the UNIX environment.

Raphael's diary entry about the Orbiten Free Software Survey prompted me to look. They have my last project but not me. Ah well, it's a big project keeping up with everybody ...

Has anyone answered andreas' question from the "future" article?

If this function is accepting a pascal-syle string:

void func (char *domain)
{
        int     len = domain[0];
...

then there is a problem when the high bit of domain[0] is set (lengths greater than 127), it will be sign-extended to fill len., causing a very big buffer overrun later on.