Some Recent Version Control-related Links
There seems to be another
BitKeeper-related fight, this time at Linux Weekly News. As far as
I remember, it's been a while since the last serious one. It was pointed
by one of the LWN letters to the editors.
LWN also published in their Development page, an
editorial titled "Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed". This
is a really bad essay. It is the second low-quality LWN feature I recall,
after the "Programming Languages - Standard-Based vs. Non-standard-based"
one (which I cannot find now using either Google or the LWN Search or its
Archives). And both of them were contributed.
There is also
a Slashdot piece on the OpenBSD project working on OpenCVS.. I
initially thought it was funny and pointless, but it may actually be
beneficial.
David Font Bug on Mandrake
On Mandrake, I had a problem that OpenOffice.org 1.1.x did not display
the David font (a Hebrew font) correctly. Eventually, I was able to solve
this problem, by removing duplicate entries with "David" in them from the
fonts.dir and fonts.scale files. Apparently, the font uninstallation procedure
did not do a good enough job of removing the font.
Now I have a problem that with OpenOffice.org 2.0.x the fonts all look like
crap, and it also takes much longer to start. I'll see what can be done about
it.
Upgrading to Kernel 2.6.9-ac14
I upgraded to kernel 2.6.9-ac14. This time the installation of the
Nvidia driver went pretty flawlessly. One thing I checked before the Nvidia
driver was installed, was the
xwd and OpenOffice
bug. It indeed does not occur without the Nvidia accelerated bugs
installed. So now this bug occurs only on Mandrake, only with OpenOffice
opened in the current virtual workspace, and only with the Nvidia drivers. How
obscure!
Fixing the Subversion install-swig-pl bug
I filed
this bug-report into the Subversion issue tracker.. Apparently, the
"make install-swig-pl" has a dependency on instaling some of the core libs, and
as a result, when being run as root (which is required for installing Perl
extensions), some of the Subversion libraries are installed as root, which is
very annoying. I wrote a patch to fix this problem, but it was not integrated
yet.
Daniel J. Bernstein's UNIX Security Vulnerabilities Course
Here's a
Slashdot post about it that I found amusing. There's also
some discussion of it in Linux
Weekly News. It says that Bernstein did not alert the developers
beforehand, but rather publicized the disclosures immediately. This again
demonstrates how socially-challenged (and opinionated with
socially-challenged opinions) he is.
Hackers-IL Discussions
There's an
interesting discussion about Perl, Java and C on Hackers-IL. While
it can be classified as a language war, it has reached some interesting
conclusions. The discussion took an ugly turn when I was attacked several
times. (including one time when someone publicly spread a vicious rumour
about my body odour). As a result, I and the other active participant have
decided to take the discussion off-list, and just place the messages
online afterwards.
Right now there's an active discussion about strncpy(), strlcpy(),
sizeof, security in C, etc. as a response to a post in Raymond Chen's
blog. I learned from it that sizeof could be used without the parenthesis
when it is used upon a variable.
My Mom and E-mail
My mom now has an account on my father's domain, and started receiving E-mails
from people. She tried using the web-mail interface, but we could not get it
to display some Hebrew E-mails, especially if the server encoded the characters
using SGML entities. So I decided to install a Windows client.
I tried installing Eudora which I really liked at the time. I installed the
ad-ware version, and it fetched the E-mails easily. But then we tried changing
the language encoding of a message. Perfectly Impossible! I went over all the
menu items and could not find anything that will allow me to do it. Google
was no help. I wonder how such a feature was omitted.
So I installed Thunderbird. It was able to read the settings and the messages
from Eudora. It works very nicely up to now, except that some Hebrew letters
are displayed as strange black circles with white question marks characters.
But this might be a font problem, or a temporary bug, and the message is still
readable.
Mom has learned how to check and read E-mail messages, and now she wants me
to teach her how to write E-mails. She might become computer-literate (in
anything besides playing Solitaire card games), after all.
GIMP Work
The Frosty Logo
was reported to produce incorrect results on recent versions of GIMP.
Since I'm very fond of this logo, I decided to take it upon myself to fix it.
The problem was in the Sparkle Plug-in. I did not know how it worked exactly,
but at least I knew that its code in GIMP 1.2 was OK. So I started going
over the diff, and eliminating portions of the code that were semantically
equivalent. I found 4 bugs this way.
As I was going to add dumps to the code, I found other bugs. You can find
my patches in the
bug report. These patches were applied, and I was jokingly labeled the
GIMP expert regarding the plug-in.
Eventually I found a bug that was present even in GIMP 1.2, and one problem
in the Frosty Logo script itelf, that was present since its introduction,
which I also corrected. Some more information can be found
in my report to the GIMP Development mailing list.
It was quite a lot of work for such an obscure feature, but it personally
bothered me, so I was motivated to do it.
Mandrake, Vim and the Vim Security Bug
I filed a bug
report about
the
recent Vim vulnerability in the Mandrake bug tracker. You can also
find there a
testcase I wrote to determine if you're vulnerable. (which is written
in Perl and should work on all UNIX platforms).
It took me quite some time to write this testcase. The original
Gentoo bug report
gives general guidelines on how to reproduce the bug, but not a prepared
test-case. So I had to understand what's going on there, and implement a
Perl script that does it. And the people on #vim on the IRC were not
very helpful in this regard.
OpenOffice.org's Export to PDF
I discovered that on my system, with a certain mixed Hebrew-English document,
the PDF exported by OpenOffice is not viewed correctly in ghostscript.
I reported a bug
report about it to the OOo bug tracker. Eventually it was closed,
claiming it was a bug in ghostscript and not in OOo. I filed a bug report
to the ghost-script bugs mailing list, and it may have reached my inbox
(cannot remember), but it's not in the mailing list archive.
Frustration!
HTML::Widgets::NavMenu
HTML::Widget::NavMenu
is the new name of my navigation menu module. After more work on it, I was
happy enough with the feautre-set and the quality of the code to release
a stable version (0.2.0) on CPAN. After the release, I continued working
on it. I added a useful feature that I before 0.2.0 replaced with a new
one (also potentially useful). And I also did a lot of refactoring which
I delayed until 0.2.0 was out the door.
I think now the code is quite ready for 0.4.0. Meanwhile, some of the
services on berlios.de are now having some problems, which slows down
my progress.
Israel.PM Meeting
We met at Dapey Zahav, as usual. Several people arrived and gathered outside
, but we could not enter the hall because none of our contacts in Dapey Zahav
have arrived and the receptionists refused to let us enter. I collected money
from people to buy drinks and snacks, and went with someone to buy drinks.
I set them out at the table inside, and then opened some of them to drink,
because I was really thirsty.
Seeing that we could not enter, we decided to cancel the meeting, and so I
and Sagiv Barhoom carried the bottles of drinks to his car, and he gave me
a ride home. On the way, we talked about Perl, GIMP, and other stuff like
that.
We are now looking for a different place to hold the meetings, seeing that
the Dapey Zahav conference basement may no longer be available.
Jimmy Wales Visit
Jimmy Wales, one of the founders
of the Wikipedia, and director of the
Wikimedia foundation, had been visiting Israel, and gave a lecture in Tel
Aviv University. My problem was that I mixed up the dates, and arrived there
a day early. I could not find any notice about his lecture anywhere, and did
not know what to do. I also was able to find up an Internet connection in one
of the computer farms, but it wasn't any help in finding the lecture room.
Eventually, I found someone who lent me her phone and I called Ofer Weisglass.
He, after checking on the computer, told me that it took place the next day,
and also told me the room number.
I arrived there the next day, and indeed the lecture took place then and there.
I was able to introduce myself to Mr. Wales, before the lecture. I recognized
a few people there. One of them was Ofer. Another one was Michael Perelmutter,
which I told him about the lecture on my way back from the university the
day before. Another one was someone from the TAU-Sec meetings, and the rest
were people I remembered from the Wikipedia meeting in Azrieli Center some
months ago.
Now for the lecture itself: Jimmy Wales gave a very interesting and
entertaining lecture. He spoke about the Wikpedia and the related services
(Wiktionary, Wikiquotes, etc.) the translations, etc. He gave a lot of
statistics, some of them very interesting. One of them, was that the size
of the database dump compressed will reach 1 TB some time from now. Another
was that 10% of the visitors have performed 80% of the changes, and 50% of
the changes were performed by only 2.5%.
He was able to throw a few jokes during the lecture. In one of them, he talked
about benevolent dictators, and said "Like Gweedo von-Rossum is for Python".
So I said "It's Kheedo von-Rossum", and he said, "Well, you can't expect
me to pronounce that..." and everybody laughed.
After the presentation, Wales stayed for the beginning of the Wikipeders
meeting, and we discussed various topics, like an Israeli squid server for the
Hebrew wikipedia. Wales then went to have several interviews with the local
media, and the rest stayed for the rest of the Wikipeders meeting.
Ofer wanted to go then, and offered me a ride. I talked to Michael who
lives close to me, but he ended up wanting to stay for the rest of the
meeting. So Ofer and I went then. On the way to his car and during the
ride home, we talked about Linux, Mandrake, and how to find your way
around a Mandrake system.
To celebrate his visit, I added
a new page
to the Wikipedia about the "Simple Simon" Solitaire Game.