Older blog entries for rmathew (starting at number 54)

glibc 2.3.4
On my machine, glibc 2.3.4 compiled rather painlessly with GCC 3.4.3 and using Linux kernel 2.6.10 headers. It installed nicely and has been running quite smoothly with all the installed applications that I checked it with. The only "application" that has shown problems with it is the (binary-only) "nvidia" X11 driver. Fortunately, the alternative "nv" driver does work properly, so I'll stick to it till Nvidia updates its driver to work properly with NPTL and 2.6.x kernels.

So why do people bitch so much about glibc?

GCC Wiki
Daniel Berlin's GCC Wiki is now officially hosted on GCC's web site. As soon as I came to know of it, I vandalised it with a stub article for GCJ. Others will hopefully add more material to it and make it actually usable by GCJ newbies.

Miscellaneous
Returning from my vacation (Goa!), I found that my Hotmail account was thankfully still there despite the deluge of spam that it was being subjected to in the last couple of weeks. Of course, it had exceeded its quota quite early on, so even some genuine messages must have bounced.

Nokia mobile phone users might find this information useful.

glibc 2.3.4 was finally released yesterday. Time to mess with my machine's happiness. ;-)

Spam
My Hotmail account with its tiny 2MB of storage is getting spammed real hard these days by some idiot peddling male organ enhancement pills. The situation is so bad that my account exceeds its storage limit overnight and leads to bounced genuine messages!

The messages are routed through different SMTP servers (most likely compromised boxes) and have different "From" and "To" headers. They do however have the same "Subject" and message body on a given day. This makes it well nigh impossible for me to create any filter to weed these out.

I don't know what will happen as I proceed on a week long vacation. :-(

If you wish to reach me, please use my Gmail account instead of the Hotmail account.

A Tinkertoy Computer That Plays Tic-Tac-Toe
I came across this reproduction of an article by A. K. Dewdney in his "Computer Recreations" series in Scientific American. I am not exaggerrating when I say that this was the series that fundamentally altered the way I looked at computers and programming. I long to read such articles now... ~sigh~

Of course, I already own copies of "Armchair Universe" and "The Computational Beauty of Nature", but a regular series like this would be quite welcome.

Making Room for Linux
Without ntfsresize to help us out, we could not have made room for a Linux installation on an unfortunate PC that had a complete Windows 2000 infestation on its entire hard disc. All hail Free software!
Hosting Zero
For some reason, the guys at Hosting Zero suddenly offered to host my site for free! So I moved my web site there. They seem to have far more facilities than Tripod where I used to host my site and have no irritating advertisements and popup windows.

Let us see how this works out. A big thanks to the guys at Hosting Zero - do check them out.

The Great GCJ Binary Compatibility Merge
Tom merged in the GCJ Binary Compatibility branch. Time to explore this with the help of the paper by Tom and Andrew.

S5
As a standards-based slide presentation framework for browsers, S5 is quite impressive!

Reality Bytes
While trying to help a friend's Mom with sending emails, I realised how much we programmers assume of the ordinary user's ability to think of computers the way we do and how unhelpful computers really are even today. It also provided me with a couple of amusing exchanges that I thought I'd share.

I asked her if she uses Netscape to check her mail. She said: "No, I use VSNL to check mails!" (VSNL is the ISP she uses and the corresponding Dial-up connection icon has the same name.)

She said: "Who is this 'SMTP' and why is he bothering me?" After a while, I figured out that she was saying this because her mail client used to show an error message like "smtp.vsnl.net responded: Please enter your correct username/password". For someone who only knows about "The Internet" and nothing of mail protocols or server hostnames, I think her indignation was somewhat justified. ;-)

Running Kernel's Image
Can anyone tell me of a reliable way of finding out the actual image (program file) that was used to launch the currently running Linux kernel?

Linux Kernel Headers
Hey, I didn't know that you were no longer supposed to maintain a "/usr/src/linux" symlink for the kernel headers!
New GCC C Parser
Lesser mortals take significantly longer than the mere week that Joseph Myers took to write a new recursive-descent C parser for GCC that accepts the same C language plus GNU extensions (a.k.a. "GNU C") as the existing one that uses Bison. :-/

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