Older blog entries for uweo (starting at number 20)

mrorganic: i love you merkins. If you don't know how to fly an airplane or to protect your valuable espionage machines then be quiet, but don't call for more military action. (killing a chinese pilot certainly _is_ military action)

A war because you lost your espionage toy? Get real. The world will be a safer place without it.
The chinese usually don't kill foreigners, but war is quite likely to.

End of flame.

olandgren wrote:

It's really surprising how easy life becomes when you realize that you are competent, can get stuff done, and are not something completely worthless. It's very interesting how the positive feedback cycle works.

Yes, but never forget that lesson. And don't forget to help others to get competent, for your own sake.

Q: What happens with this code:

sockfd=accept(fd, (struct sockaddr *)&sin, &sinl);
if (sin.sin_family==AF_INET6) 
  if (sinl<sizeof(struct sockaddr_in6))
   return ERROR;
/* ok */

if it happens to meet a glibc-2.2 / linux-2.2.18 system?

A: The kernel sets sinl to 24. sizeof(struct sockaddr_in6), if taken from netinet/in.h, is 28.

Things like this aren't likely to make me happy.

Back from vacation. 180 hours ago the world looked quite good. Now it's cold, rainy and dark. Oh well.
No, i don't mind rain. It's just that the rain is cold, which isn't really how i like it.
Oh well, i'll return some day. I liked the people.

I released ftpcopy-0.3.6 on tuesday and also update the strhash distribution. I also began to cleanup the udpserver code, but stumbled at the point where i had to update the documentation.

The problem is that pod is not good enough, texinfo can't generate manual pages. Let's sort the important points:

1. i'm not going to duplicate information. It's bad enough that code, --help output and documentation can get out of sync, anything more is just not acceptable.
2. any system i work on shall have all needed tools installed by default.
3. i want manual pages. They don't have to be perfect.
4. i want reasonable html output (this rules out pod).
5. i also like printed manuals.

I feel a temptation to write the documentation in texinfo and use a slightly modified man2html for the manual pages, but that's still not good enough.

It seems that i'm never satisfied with whatever solution i use for manuals. I started with ASCII text, then i used texinfo, tried a number of other documentation systems, went back to texinfo (using a number of wrappers around it, it didn't like umlauts back then), tried html, tried a number of html wrappers, want back to nroff / man, and finally i tried pod. Not a single solution lasted for more than a year.

Work hasn't been funny this week. I'm again at the point i've been in september and october, and that's alarming, meaning that i'm not feeling well here anymore (and judging from what i hear some other people share this feeling).
I'm tired of doing patchwork on other peoples projects, especially since i don't see any chance to finish my own stuff. I'm also tired of getting spam complaints. I'm tired of the misorganisation here. I'm tired of not having the wrench needed to assemble a 19'-rack (it's not the only tool missing).

Almost nothing happened at home. I'm tempted to move. But where to? Simple answer: somewhere near the coast (being able to reach the sea in less than 2.5 hours? Really tempting). But it seems that 99% of the job openings are in the other direction.

To make it short: I'm still totally demotivated and only waiting for the vacation to start, which will happen 2001-03-03.
I'm going to be _far_ away from any computer, i hope.

But still, there are promises to keep and things to be done:

• wrote the qmail-sendmail replacement, which just replaces the commandline sendmail emulation in the qmail package (in case you wonder: you almost certainly don't need it).
• released ftpcopy-0.3.5. There's no really important reason to update.
• released upgpverify-0.3.2 , a pgp/gpg filter for use in .qmail files. It checks the signature, decrypting if needed, and call's another program which can read de-mimed payload on a file descriptor. It shall replace the hackish pgp stuff used in the BBS (i remember having promised to replace that years ago).
• "released" (somewhat) cacco-0.4.0.tar.gz, a collection of tools to summarize cisco accounting files ("show ip accounting"). The documentation is pretty minimal. I packaged that just to keep a promise given almost 10 months ago.
  Besides it's quite a bit faster than the stuff my boss did.

I spent an evening trying to find out why lrzsz was unable to get stuff from a friends computer. It turned out that some piece of hardware at his site "compressed" a series of "@" bytes to just two "@" bytes. I really think his self-made internal communication system is at least a bit broken.

I didn't work on any piece of free software in december, without even noticing it. Motivation is everything, and i'm complete demotivated. Living in a building yard isn't really helpful, and that idiot of a worker who just entered the wrong room and moved a lot of papers into the dustbin ... well, to make it short, i still wonder what to do to him for that. It took me weeks to recover from that.

But the whois server was ready when he was needed (which was a few days later then planned, but that's ok). And it's used in two places by now, and seems to be _really_ stable (in both cases the source of support problems is identical to the source of the data, something which i'm no responsible for. Fortunately).

Released ftpcopy-0.3.4 and iodo-0.2.4 in january (the later is a collection of tools to create sockets and execute some other process, possibly under another user id).

fefe: of course size is important.

It's now three weeks without gas heating and water in my rooms (in all my rooms, though - i originally hoped to have water in the bath room).

Life is complicated.
Nothing happened on any free software project for quite a long time, until yesterday at least. It took some time to recover from that security hole: I was so sure that "too much trust" can't happen to me. The lesson hit me hard.

I actually learned something from it, and did some changes to the design of the whois server i started to write this week. Well, minor changes, fortunately.
Regarding whois server: the beast will possibly end up as GPL - $boss mentioned this (why he did it is a different story). Even after one week i still believe that the design is right, and apart from a few compatibility hacks to allow it to be used as a drop-in replacement at [unnamed COM-NET-ORG registrar] it will be quite nice (and even these hacks may be turned of).
I'd love to use a template system for the output, but that will not work out, too many things depend on the content of a record (at least that's the unfortunate situation at the registrar). I'm still undecided whether i'll include script language code in the output template, or create the complete output using a script language. [i tend to do the later, i don't need to parse templates that way].

Aside from that: I'm still living inside a building yard. The gas heating has been removed, and it will take 10 further days until the new one is installed (and even then things will get "funny": a low temperature boiler will then feed old time radiators). Right now it's somewhat cold in my rooms ...
Things will get worse: i'll not have water in the kitchen any longer. It will pay out in the long run, though.

A totally unrelated question: a friend of mine want's to install a VPN to my site. Nice idea, but i've a strong feeling that PPP over SSH isn't really a bright idea (my understand of TCP congestion control is that it isn't meant to be used over another congestion controlled media). He thinks it works, i think it _can't_ work with a loaded low-bandwidth link. Who is right, or where can i read more?

spot: please don't mention the daemons of /. I'd hate to see them getting busy here.

Released ftpcopy-0.3.3.

When i wrote the program i thought something like "why bother? It's me own FTP server anyway": I wrote the program to automatically copy files between 2 servers. When i re-read the code i thought the same. Later i decided to use it to mirror other servers, too, and even later i decided to make the code available to others ...
When i read about the scp security hole on bugtraq i suddenly *knew* where to look into.

The lesson? Don't allow bad code to exist, even for internal use.

The good news: My caffeine addiction seems to wear off. I was really, really tired on saturday and sunday, but i'm beginning to feel better again. No coke, no tea for almost 100 hours ...
I didn't get a caffeine addiction for three years, up to 2000-07. But then the stress level increased drastically, and i, once again, was stupid enough to let work get too much influence on my life.

The bad news: i detected a security problem in ftpcopy. No buffer overrun, no printf/syslog hole: "too much trust in the FTP server". Damned.