evardsson.com: stuff that w0rks
a bunch of fiction with a few hacky tech articles
Found this over at InfoQ:
Sun today is releasing Java SE, ME and Glassfish under GPLv2. This is in combination with an early release of the SE 7 Hotspot JVM, javac compiler and JavaHelp.
Sun has more information about the Java open-source project, as well as a press center.
It seems that Alaskans have made their decisions. Let’s just see how this plays out …
While watching the national election results I am torn between thoughts:
Waiting . . .
Update 9:22 PM: First results have shown up on the State Elections website. So far they are disappointing.
Update 9:29 PM: Alaska results are starting to show up on CNN finally. So I can put my laptop to bed now.
We’ll see where it all goes by tomorrow morning I guess.
While the debates carry on over what can be done to make Linux more feasible in the desktop market (in other words desirable enough that average users say “I want that!”) the one argument that seems to rise to the top is eye candy. Does it affect how an OS works? No. Does it change the way programs behave? Maybe superficially. Does it change the way users interact with the OS and the programs? You bet!
I had a chance to play with Kororaa, a Gentoo-based live CD with AIGL/Xgl and a great install-to-disk tool. And while Xgl is not quite ready for prime-time (I encountered a couple crashes where xdm would completely exit and restart) it is getting close. And the eye candy features (adjustable transparency on windows, the rotating cube desktop, the “liquid-ish” movement of the windows) add a certain amount of “ooh factor.” But the biggest thing I found myself using were three very handy tools: [Ctrl+Shift+Alt+ left or right arrow] to rotate the desktop cube with the active window following, the hot-corner to display all the open windows as tiles, and the [Ctrl+Alt+PgDown] to “flatten” the cube, allowing you to see all the sides at once and use the arrow keys to select one of the desktops to switch to. While many will consider this to still be nothing more than eye-candy, I found it so utile that I am (a little too) eagerly awaiting the next Xgl implementation.
So who, besides me, thinks that these are as useful as they are eye candy-ish? Well, Apple, for one. They already have the hot-corner to display all the open windows, the ability to show all the open windows of one application, and (with Parallels at least – and rumor has it in the next OSX version) the cube concept of the multiple desktops.
After much fighting with XMail, and repeated failure I fell back on the MTA I know best (Postfix), and the local delivery and authentication I know least (mostly because prior to installing XMail on the old server I never had to bother with it.)
So, after checking around I found a fairly well-documented Postfix + Courier-IMAP + SASL + MySQL How-To for Gentoo. While it is specefic in some regards to Gentoo, the majority of the instructions should be fairly straightfoward to transfer to other *nixes.
Anyway, mail is working again, at least mostly. I still need to replace some aliases and a distribution list, but that’s all pretty simple normally, and with the MySQL db added in the mix it gets even easier, since Postfix is looking to the db for virtual domains, users, aliases, relocated mappings, everything. How much simpler can it get?
Now, if there were just one package that combined all the mail functions (kind of like XMail) and integrated with MySQL and came with decent documentation and installed from one package … Maybe Courier will move beyond version 0.53 someday and become more of a player.
Replacing the old PIII 733MHz server with a slightly less old PIII 1GHz server was mostly very straightforward. That in and of itself doesn’t seem like much, until you consider that the old server was running a stripped out Vector with a chrooted lampp, and the replacement is running Gentoo with the traditional-one-tool-at-a-time type installation.
It was mostly simple, since every single tool I use has a Gentoo ebuild. Everything seemed to be going just fine, until I discovered the hard way that the Gentoo ebuild for XMail is b0rked. :-/
Well, since it is way past my bedtime I am going to put it down for the night and try to tackle it tomorrow. But, until I get it working all mail to evardsson.com and talkingfox.com will bounce. Sorry.
In an article titled “Stiff asks, great programmers answer,” blogger Jarosaw “sztywny” Rzeszótko gets answers from some of the most influential programmers of the day. Includes responses from Linus Torvalds (Linux), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Tim Bray (XML, Atom), Guido Van Rossum (Python), Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmer), David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails Framework), and Googlers Steve Yegge and Peter Norvig.
While there are a good deal of serious answers about tools, platforms, methods, skills and so forth, the gem that made me chuckle was the response from Guido Van Rossum to the question “What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?”:
I guess being able to cook an egg for breakfast is invaluable.
This is a Critical exploit, capable of executing code as the user running Internet Explorer. Reports of this in the wild as well as a temporary patch can be found at the Internet Storm Center.
From the eEye Digital Security Alert:
The PoC is an integer overflow-based heap overflow, in the DSA_SetItem function in COMCTL32.DLL. An arithmetic overflow can occur during multiplication to calculate the desired size for a call to ReAlloc, that isn’t reproduced during a subsequent call to memmove, so the allocated size can be smaller than the copy size and result in a heap buffer overflow. …
This vulnerability can result in remote code execution in the context of the logged in user. In order to exploit this an attacker must create a malicious website or leverage a site that allows for custom user content.
While the vulnerability was posted on the Browser Fun Blog on July 18th, the exploit first appeared over the weekend. The Microsoft Security Advisory has details on how to patch manually and how to apply the manual change to group policy.
Affects:
Although it has been said many, many times, be careful how you surf. Make sure your machine is patched, you have anti-virus and spy ware blockers, blah blah blah.
Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then maybe this video will shed some light on the subject (sorry – it is an ad for McAfee, which I neither use nor recommend – just my personal preference) .
Python 2.5 Final was released today. Get it!
Wow, and on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, too!