I spent some time today using Valgrind to track down uninitialized memory reads and similar problems in Ghostscript. So far, 4 out of 5 have been legitimate problems, and at least one was probably capable of real mischief. The one false positive was due to a compiler optimization, and became clear on viewing the assembler (roughly, ashort[0] == 42 && ashort[1] == 69 being collapsed into a single comparison).
Peter Deutsch reports that his stabs using Purify and Insure++ were very frustrating, because about 90-95% of the reports were false positives.
The lack of a good free memory debugger has long been a source of disappointment to me. Valgrind has singlehandedly done a lot to renew my faith in free software.
New monitor
The new monitor for spectre appeared today. It's a ViewSonic P95f. Overall, it seems pretty good, but not sensational. I wanted a 19" to save space and power, figuring that the next monitor I buy will be a high-res LCD such as the IBM T221 (drool).
The monitor goes up to 1920x1440 (about 140 dpi), but running test patterns shows that the horizontal resolution is limited by the aperture grill, which is about 100 stripes per inch. As far as vertical resolution goes, you can actually see individual scanlines even at that resolution.
So the "real" resolution is somewhere around 1600x1200 (about 115 dpi). I wonder how shadow mask monitors such as the Hitachi CM715 stack up by comparison. That display has a dot pitch of about .22mm, which should match the 1600x1200 well. It's cheaper and draws less power, too.
I haven't finished playing with font rendering, but so far it looks like my original suspicion is true: at 140 dpi, antialiased unhinted text is nearly as contrasty as monochrome. Driving the monitor at more than its "real" resolution might be a good deal, if it means you can use unhinted aa fonts without compromise.
Internet telephones
Wes posted a link on ENUM recently. Basically, it's a mapping from telephone numbers to domain names, so you can use DNS to resolve them to IP addresses. You reverse the digits, join with '.', and put .e164.arpa at the end. So my phone number is 8.9.3.6.6.4.7.7.0.7.1.e164.arpa. This should resolve to something like 63.196.208.218, but of course doesn't. The phone companies prefer it this way. There's no good technological reason to have a phone any more, but as long as it's too hard for near-PhD's, the phone companies don't have much to worry about.
I tried setting up gnomemeeting with blanu (who is experimenting with streaming media), but we didn't get it to work. On my side, it was probably the laptop's sound driver, for which I've never really bothered to get the microphone to work.
Part of the problem is trying to use general purpose hardware like a PC with a sound card for a specific task. However, there's no reason why you couldn't build internet phone hardware. In fact, I think it's a great idea.
For my setup, I'd want two pieces of hardware. One would be exactly the same hardware as an Apple AirPort, but the phone port would be for voice calls, not for the modem. The AirPort is a 386 PC anyway, so I wouldn't be surprised if you could use it for this.
The other piece of hardware is simply A/D and D/A converters, an 802.11b card, and a battery. The cost of the 802.11b chipset is around $22, and cards are now retailing for $35 after rebate. There's no reason why this part couldn't be retailed for $100. Of course, what makes this product really appealing is playing Ogg files from your home media server. Before the iPod was released, some people thought that's what it would be.
I think whichever manufacturer figures this out is going to sell a hell of a lot of them. Making the (Windows) software nice and easy to use is nontrivial, but I don't care. I'd just run it off my Linux boxen anyway.
Google and the dangers of centralization
Google is amazing. When in online conversations, I routinely ask Google for the answers to questions that come up, and I almost always get the answers. Not only that, but Google is fast. In fact, it's quite competitive with DNS.
It's going to be very, very hard for anyone else to compete with Google, in part because of their PageRank algorithm (the rest of it is just kick-ass good implementation). As a result, Google is in great danger of become a central point of failure for the whole useful Internet. People don't seem to have started worrying about this yet, probably because they're so damn good at what they do. By contrast, VeriSign (formerly Network Solutions, formerly the InterNic) got people worried fairly early on, because they suck so hard.
But Google is not a public service. In fact, it will probably become a publicly traded corporation soon, with a fiduciary obligation to shareholders. How much money might they be able to extract from their position? Think about that when you read The Google AdWords Happening.
SourceForge
I note with some Schadenfreude that SourceForge no longer seems to be hosting their own downloads, using mirrors at Telia, ibiblio, and Belnet instead.
Why Schadenfreude? In large part because they don't listen when I have things to say. Other, healthier organizations and people don't seem to have this problem. Oh well.