Slashdot Mirror

I wrote this script to relink a dynamically-linked program with as many equivalent static libraries as possible, with any unavailable static libraries left dynamic. I use it to ship a static version of libguestfs

Whether static binaries are a good idea, I'll leave that discussion up to others. I would say that dynamic linking should be preferred, but static linking and this script is quite useful in some circumstances.

Rich.

Yes, writing scripts in C is a great idea.

It's certainly not a new idea ...

Minimal webserver, written in C, supporting C scripts ...

We designed a "peer-to-peer" MMO many years ago, although I have to say we didn't implement it and the devil is definitely in the implementation. Anyway, you can read the design docs here. After it was clear we weren't going to write it, I published the docs just to give a priority date (1998) to invalidate any stupid patents ...

Rich.

I wrote a little "literate" FORTH tutorial if any readers of the above comment are interested in it: jonesforth.

This is something we were working on from 1998. We documented the design in some detail, and I released the documentation to prevent people from trying to patent it: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/fleet

The innovation in this (never-built) MMO is that the design requires no server at all. It what might now be called "P2P" (although that term wasn't around at the time).

Rich.

Safari, FireFox, and Opera (in that order) have been showing marked improvements in Javascript performance. To the point where Javascript performance is a major point of competition.

I was playing with haXe which is a programming language that targets both Flash and Javascript back ends. You can (within some constraints) compile the same program to both targets, so that's what I did yesterday:

• Flash version (requires Adobe plugin)
• Javascript version (requires Firefox 3 or Safari with the canvas widget)

Use keys 1-9 to change demos, and click with the mouse to fire blocks.

I found that Adobe's Flash plugin beat everything, Safari+Javascript was pretty slow, and Firefox+Javascript was in the middle (but still pretty slow compared to Flash). Gnash doesn't run this demo at all, although it can run other haXe code.

Rich.

Safari, FireFox, and Opera (in that order) have been showing marked improvements in Javascript performance. To the point where Javascript performance is a major point of competition.

I was playing with haXe which is a programming language that targets both Flash and Javascript back ends. You can (within some constraints) compile the same program to both targets, so that's what I did yesterday:

• Flash version (requires Adobe plugin)
• Javascript version (requires Firefox 3 or Safari with the canvas widget)

Use keys 1-9 to change demos, and click with the mouse to fire blocks.

I found that Adobe's Flash plugin beat everything, Safari+Javascript was pretty slow, and Firefox+Javascript was in the middle (but still pretty slow compared to Flash). Gnash doesn't run this demo at all, although it can run other haXe code.

Rich.

You really ought to learn a little bit about how Forth works before making more of a fool of yourself in public. I wrote a tutorial here on the subject.

Rich.

Obligatory:

My FORTH tutorial

Rich.

Rich.

I ran a spam archive for a number of years, with emails dating back to around 1997. It's a lot of trouble - classifying spam isn't 100%, so there ended up being a few personal emails in there. However the big problems were these:

• Spammers or people whose names/company names appeared in spam (actual spam, that this) would send me random legal threats. None of them panned out in the end, but you can never tell.
• Everyone would be downloading the whole archive (gigabytes) to train their filters, at first killing my DSL, later blowing my bandwidth cap.

Now, none of these things can't be overcome of course (Bittorrent, no Google indexing), but I can understand why spamarchive.org wouldn't want the hassle, particularly since they probably weren't making any money out of it.

I still make my spam archive available to legitimate researchers, and I'm glad to say that a paper has been published and another is in preparation.

Rich.

Of course not. ical runs on anything (well, any Unix at least). And you can use it on any X11 enabled display of course.

Rich.

How come they own that name when the ical program which a lot of us have presumably used is something like 15 years old (and predates the web) ??

Automatic buffer overflow protection only covers the straightforward buffer overflow problems, i.e. array index overflows. In the case of more complex pointer arithmetic, where most of these problems occur, automatic protection is not possible (at least not without losing the option of pointer arithmetic).

Actually, automatic checking is very much possible, and has been for years. For example, Bounds checking gcc (that website is down right now, so try my page on the subject). That was written in 1994, and there are newer systems available now which don't have such a serious performance penalty.

The real solution is to stop writing critical code in C. Other languages provide bounds checking, and are faster and safer than C: for example OCaml which I prefer nowadays.

Rich.

http://www.annexia.org/tmp/multithreading.ps

Rich.

It allows you to create object-oriented web apps in C which compile into tiny servers (and I mean tiny - the web server fits into the L1 cache on most computers). But they come with all the usual features like a templating system, database access and so on.

Rich.

Internet Archive version.

Rich.

Name one. The best I've found is ical. It's a very sad statement that although over 10 years old, no one has written anything better in that time. Yes, it has flaws. But fewer than any of the alternatives. Lots of calendar apps? Yep. But they all suck. And that's not a healthy position for us to be in.

Repeat after me: "A calendar has no place in an email user agent". Anyone that believes otherwise simply doesn't understand the issues. What people a crying out for is not a reimplementation of Outlook, but something that lets them manage their time with the same ease that Outlook does. That means sending out meeting requests, with calendars being updated as appropriate on acceptance. It means the ability to check others' calendars to look for a suitably free time slot. And it means being able to do so with the click of a button or two. It doesn't require calendaring and email to be the same application, though, and indeed, it's much better if they're not.

But projects like Evolution are too hellbent on reimplementing all the mistakes made by Microsoft to step back and actually look at doing the right thing.

http://www.annexia.org/freeware/cpptemplates/index .msp

Rich.

Rich.

Rich.

<plug>

Very true. That's why you need a web server like rws which is tiny, and loads C-based CGIs into memory, and has a full database layer.

</plug>

Rich.

Rich.

$ wc -l .whitelist
804 .whitelist

It works, but it's a pain, and I still have to manually check the spam folder once in a while to catch people writing to me out of the blue about my software. And there are still a few false positives in the archive (tell me about them, and I'll try and weed them out).

Rich.

Gratuitous spam archive advert: http://www.annexia.org/spam/

Rich.

http://www.annexia.org/

I think you're thinking of the templates in C++. www.annexia.org/freeware/cpptemplates/.

Off the top of my head, VRML, Wavefront, DXF are natively exported and 3ds, 3DSMax and some others can be done using Python. XRacer - a WipeOut clone - uses Blender for its modelling. Check out the source which includes all the export scripts here.

http://www.annexia.org/linux/btinteractive-linux-h owto.html

Rich -- Play xracer!

PCs have about a 3:1 price performance advantage over Ultra 5s and 10s. They come with a terrible operating system (Solaris) which, to a Linux user, is a really horrible experience. No command line editing. X runs like a dog with two legs at 1024x768x8 bits. No Gnu tools. Standard tools like `ping' which core dump all the time. Please. Thanks, but no thanks.

Rich.

Needless to say, anyone looking to escape from the terror of an anti-OSS environment is welcome to apply for a job :-)

Rich

Ask anyone who uses Windows why they can't use XYZ alternative operating system. You'll get two answers: (1) Because some vital software they use doesn't run on XYZ. (2) Because they have hundreds or thousands of important documents in some proprietary format supported only on a Windows application.

In other words: lock in.

Bill Gates and the app vendors have very successfully locked users in to a single platform and set of applications (in fact, Billy's been more successful than most of the app vendors at this too).

Solve this problem --- help develop Wine or whatever is required --- and you solve the lock in problem. You'll have 90% of the market in no time (assuming your compatible OS is cheaper in beer terms than Windows).

Rich.

http://www.annexia.org/text/spam-mea sures.html

Rich.

Take a look: It's here.

The really hard stuff (for me) like modelling, sounds, textures isn't coming along very fast because in spite of what other people have said, the coding is the easy bit.

Rich.

http://www.annexia.org/text/spam-mea sures.html

It advocates both technical and social fixes to the problem of spamming.

Rich. ( http://www.annexia.org/)

http://www.annexia.org/text/spam-mea sures.html

It advocates both technical and social fixes to the problem of spamming.

Rich. ( http://www.annexia.org/)