Older blog entries for redi (starting at number 199)

6 Feb 2010 (updated 6 Feb 2010 at 02:16 UTC) »

The diary entry by humaurtumonline is gibberish, quite possibly the output of a Markov chain. hjclub asks "why shouldn't I cert him as a journeyer?"

From the Advogato FAQ:

the purpose of the trust metric is to certify that a given user account on Advogato is known by the Advogato community to actually belong to the individual who claims it and is known to be a member of the free software and open source community.

There is no reason to suspect that user has any involvement in free software, certainly not deserving a journeyer cert

4 Feb 2010 (updated 4 Feb 2010 at 14:44 UTC) »
8191, we have ways of defending ourselves :)

The "flag account as spam" system works pretty well, and the SEO spammers are too stupid to realise that observer's posts have nofollow tags and are not indexed by google. It takes more than that to compromise Advogato.

P.S. Aryson Young is a lowlife spammer.

I haven't posted much recently, but I've been pretty busy adding C++0x support in GCC and helping resolve some of the Library Working Group issues list. My changes to std::function caused some regressions when combining it with std::bind, so it was necessary to finish the rvalue changes for bind as well. I also rewrote most of <future>, and have just checked in an implementation of std::condition_variable_any. GCC 4.5 is shaping up to be quite an exciting release for anyone interested in C++0x. IMHO Jason Merrill deserves special mention for his work on the g++ front-end, he seems to be adding new C++0x features as fast as he's fixing long-standing C++03 bugs - great work!

8191, if diary replies don't appear on recentlog then it's not possible to follow a thread unless you keep visiting the top post that started the thread. By following recentlog you see the replies, even if they are jumbled up among lots of other unrelated posts.

Otherwise, keep up the good work!

9 Dec 2009 (updated 9 Dec 2009 at 10:08 UTC) »

Last week I added rvalue support to std::function, so that you can invoke it with move-only types such as std::unique_ptr. That will be included in the GCC 4.5 release. Doug Gregor originally contributed the <tr1/functional> implementation that it's based on and it's really cool stuff. I continue to be in awe of Doug and the other authors of Boost.Function and Boost.Bind.

I'm still wrestling with std::bind

Comagan Suresh, the lowlife SEO spammer, is still creating accounts here. My previous post calling him a lowlife spammer is currently the 3rd and 4th google hit for his name. Stick that in your SEO and smoke it.

Come back and visit us again, fzort - or syndicate relevant posts here please.

An SEO spammer has created several accounts today, all with real name "comagan suresh". It's hard to know whether to tell search engines that Comagan Suresh is a spammer and lowlife, or whether it's someone else trying to harm his reputation. Oops, too late now.

I've just noticed mentifex recently wrote a rebuttal to an old article, where he refers to himself in the third person and calls advogato "a major battleground in the conflict between censorship and freedom of speech." I fear if he does herald the technological singularity then the future is going to be like getting spammed by a Dada Engine with a persecution complex.

Wow, a whole site dedicated to removing all the joy and humour from xkcd.

caolan's diary entry makes me wonder why people in large C++ projects like OOo still insist on managing memory the hard way. If cppcheck (a simple pattern matcher) can find those problems then the bad/missing delete must have been very close to the new so there's no reason it couldn't be wrapped in a smart type that would clean up automatically. I dread to think how many memory-related bugs there are in OOo that can't be detected by simple pattern-matching.

chalst is fighting the good fight against spam. A few months ago I contacted Adecco NZ's IT department after I noticed a spammer creating advogato accounts linking to Adecco NZ and Adecco Australia. I said:

I assume you have hired someone to do some seach engine optimisation, or try to improve your google ratings - if that's the case, you've hired a lowlife who is willing to abuse unrelated websites to post spam. If that was done on Adecco's behalf that's a great way to damage your image and to get a reputation as spammers.

They replied:

Thank you for deleting this account. This advertisement was not done on behalf of Adecco New Zealand.

We have had issues with a scammer [...]. This scammer has been posing as an Adecco New Zealand employee on international job forums and is luring job seekers in to a money forwarding scheme. We have notified authorities and are actively working to shut this scam operation down.

If there is any help you can give us (i.e. IP address/ISP this person connected from to your servers, etc), it would be much appreciated.

So apparently not all spam accounts are misguided attempts at SEO, some may be slightly sneakier.

6 Nov 2009 (updated 6 Nov 2009 at 16:38 UTC) »

My preferred explanation for apparent backwards causation sabotaging the LHC relies on the many-worlds interpretation.

Maybe the production of measurable quantities of Higgs bosons for any length of time is so utterly abhorrent to the universe that it implodes or ceases to exist in some other way (possibly turning into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised looking whale) or maybe as the crackpots have it, the LHC will produce a black hole that will swallow the Earth. Should that happen we wouldn't be around to experience it, so the fact that you are reading this implies you are on a world-line in which the LHC failed to destroy the planet (yet!) It seems that in your world-line the LHC failed because of a series of unfortunate events preventing it from coming online.

I am writing this from a parallel universe where the LHC did produce Higgs bosons. One of the unexpected consequences was the ability to blog in parallel dimensions, but I'd better not tell you about the others, as you probably wouldn't believe me.

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