Older blog entries for madhatter (starting at number 27)

well this is about the third round of this fight that I remember, so I think I'll try a more realistic approach. why are software developers using a community website about software to voice political opinions??? why can't we keep it to just software around here? sure, we all have more things to talk about in life besides software, but that's why I use things like livejournal and simply link to my livejournal on my public page instead of throwing my personal happenings/views in everyone's damn face. my girlfriend might be pregant, but wtf do open-source developers care? I don't think that anyone will disagree that this is counter-productive. what are we all getting out of this? and WHAT THE HELL are some of us thinking by threatening to certify certain people to cause more of a battle? what's next, defacing each other's homepages with l33t 0days and posting pro/anti war stuff???

GASP!!!

http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030402/tech_microsoft_google_1.html

Linux 2.4.x ptrace exploit

what a doozy, and I didn't want to have to run a 2.5 kernel... so i tried some things. Solar Designer happens to have a experimental security patch for 2.4.20 (www.openwall.com), but unfortunately it didn't stop the exploit from working. Next, St. Jude (sf.net/projects/stjude). I've had success with using St. Jude before, and it seems to stop this exploit from working. I also tested some other recent security problems (xfree86 XLOCALEDIR env overflow, and cupsd remote overflow) and it was able to stop BOTH of them from working. Good job Tim Lawless.

tk:
I've wondered that for a while too.... at least with a numerical-type name we would all have a unique identifier. Numbers as names does strike me as a chilling thought for some reason.

GCC quirk

i was fooling around with SIMD instructions on my notebook today and found something with gcc inline assembly:

asm volatile("xor %%eax,%%eax\n");

it looks like a pretty reasonable statement, but unfortunately it will not compile. gas will tell you that %%eax is an invalid register. it was throwing me for a loop for a while until mpr pointed out to me that gcc did not strip the first parentheses from the register name for some reason. gas doesn't want "%%eax", it wants "%eax", so I was sitting there with my thumb up my butt for about 5 minutes until I started messing with my inline statement, then doing gcc -S to see what the assembler output looked like. I couldn't get gcc to strip the first parentheses until I changed it to this:

asm volatile("xor %%eax,%%eax\n" : );

no, that's not supposed to be a smiley face. If you at least put the output operand colon there gcc will strip the first parentheses, otherwise it will assemble it without touching it and gas will go kaput. does anyone know why this happens?

hey, if you are into modeling and movement algorithms, this is alot of fun: www.sodaplay.com

gone

gone

gone

obsolete