I spent last weekend in Sydney, primarily to deliver an "Introduction to Linux" information packet at the Borland convention (or are they Inprise this week?)

At any rate, as Seth says, it was truly remarkable to talk to technical people not familiar with Free Unix. The questions -- from people quite expert in their particular field -- made me realize how much we take for granted. "What's X11?" "Can you explain about mount points again?" I think technically it compared quite well to the Microsoft: things like being able to run particular programs as root rather than being required to shut down the whole desktop were well appreciated. Even little details like the drag-and- middleclick rather than select-edit-copy-click-edit-paste are nice, but take some learning.

It was an excuse to ride my bike up and back: up through Bateman's Bay and the Princes' Highway, and back through Wooloongong and the Illawara Highway. Very beautiful, though a little wet and scary in places. If you like heavenly scenery flying past, you simply must see them.

I'm reading the new Iain M. Banks novel, "Look to Windward", and Richard Steven's "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment." It goes without saying that both are superlative.

You know you're going to have a bad day when you connect to a Unix machine and it greets you with a Microsoft copyright.

Stevens has proved its value once again in helping track down rsync bugs on SCO OpenServer. In particular, on some SysV kernels, explicitly setting SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN rather than letting it default means that zombies are never generated, and therefore waitpid made rsync considerably confused. Let's not even mention the existence of both SIGCHLD and SIGCLD. Anyone who thinks proprietary software is the way of the future should be chained to an OpenSwerver box for a week.

rusty complained about the apparent difficulty of running gdb on libtool-mangled binaries. The solution is to also use libtool to run gdb. This will do it, I think:

  libtool --mode=execute gdb ./myfoo