Mikal laments about the evils of blog spam – stillhq.com – Blog spam continued.
Let me let all of you non-wordpress using people (who have comments enabled) know that you have been living in sin!
Yes, there is an answer to all your problems. I’ve been running the HashCash extenstion to wordpress for about a week. In that time, I have received no comment spam. Only real comments.
How freakin awesome is that?
To try and help in debugging, I’ve been playing with some of the extra tools that come with Valgrind.
Everybody knows that if you aren’t using Valgrind you are living in sin.
I’ve recently tried to have a go at using Helgrind. It’s suppossed to be able to help you in finding race conditions in multithreaded applications.
Well, mysql is multithreaded, and so is NDB (cluster), so, this could be rather useful (especially since, with some new work being done, i’ve found race conditions, i just need to find out where).
From the manual:
Basically what Helgrind does is to look for memory locations which are accessed by more than one thread. For each such location, Helgrind records which of the program’s (pthread_mutex_)locks were held by the accessing thread at the time of the access. The hope is to discover that there is indeed at least one lock which is used by all threads to protect that location. If no such lock can be found, then there is (apparently) no consistent locking strategy being applied for that location, and so a possible data race might result.
sounds reasonable enough.
Now I’m actually chasing up one of it’s possible data races and seeing if it is, in fact, a race.
Has anybody else had any experience with Helgrind? Thoughts?
Slashdot | Nokia’s Linux Handheld
This device shows a lot of promise.
I carry a mobile phone nearly everywhere. it’s nice, small, makes phone calls, receives phone calls, has a rudimentary (and, of course, rather broken) calendar and todo. it’s phone book is mostly pretty good and the ‘mobile internet’ that we were told was going to change the world, didn’t.
I have a laptop. it’s great, i spend *heaps* of time on it. in fact, it’s a primary workhorse for a lot of things. But, it can be a bit big, and i don’t take it everywhere.
I have a Newton (that I don’t use anymore, it’s only a 120, and getting it to sync with evolution would be, well, interesting). I love the newton UI, handwriting recognition and *size*.
Yes, the Newton was large, bigger than a palm, but tihs made it useful. you could see a fair bit at once, and it was easy to read.
I do not want a big mobile phone with a big screen and all the bells and whistles (decent cpu, free software, full net access, bluetooth, 802.11 etc). I wouldn’t carry it everywhere (which is the point of a mobile) – it would be too bulky.
having two complementary devices (as this seems to be) would be great for me. I wouldn’t take it when i went out on the town, but would when i jumped in the car going somewhere i hadn’t been before.
now, if only evolution didn’t leak memory like, well, something that leaks a lot – and it’d run on this baby.. then we’d be in business.
great promise though. all the right technologies – linux, X, gtk.
one thing it is missing though is a hard drive. i reckon this would be an ipod-killer if it had a nice HD in there and some sweet looking software to play tunes (ogg, of course).
they’ve also got the dev stuff up already. with a ‘howto port your app’ featuring gaim. very cool.
so, here’s to another possibly great ARM based handheld. Now, if only it was available in australia now, and there was a phone running free software to go with it.
revenge/therapy � rant: web standards
she’s full-on joined thoes of us who are enlightened.
well, to web standards anyway – and is now spreading the love (or becoming dominating standards overlord who kills at the sight of invalid XHTML*) around the office.
Yes, it also surprises me how little of the importance of standards compliance is taught to graduates. Same with coding. I think it would be a great reqirement for CS courses that you code something (that is then accepted into the main source tree) of an open source project (preferably a generally well known one with decent standards about what goes into the tree) How you would mark something like this i have no idea… maybe some form of peer-review/marking thing.
* Yes, I have been watching too much Alias since I got back
hopefully this will help stop comment spam.
using HashCash
makes the client do a md5 of a string for each comment submitted.
okay, so now you need javascript to comment on my blog.
but frankly, that’s better than me fighting urges to kill, torture and maime guilty people. (spammers, not comment leavers)
/* Force server down. kill all connections and threads and exit */
#if defined(OS2) || defined(__NETWARE__)
extern "C" void kill_server(int sig_ptr)
#define RETURN_FROM_KILL_SERVER DBUG_VOID_RETURN
#elif !defined(__WIN__)
static void *kill_server(void *sig_ptr)
#define RETURN_FROM_KILL_SERVER DBUG_RETURN(0)
#else
static void __cdecl kill_server(int sig_ptr)
#define RETURN_FROM_KILL_SERVER DBUG_VOID_RETURN
#endif
{
DBUG_ENTER("kill_server");
(from sql/mysqld.cc)
There just has to be a better way to do this….
maybe we need a kill_server which is platform defined (e.g. in a mythical win32.cc, netware.cc or generic_sane_unix.cc) and the generic _kill_server in mysqld.cc? possibly some variation of… some platforms seem to do strange things.
i don’t know. it just doesn’t look that clean to me…. maybe i need more coffee.
/build/buildd/gdb-6.3/gdb/linux-nat.c:1208: internal-error: wait_lwp: Assertion `pid == GET_LWP (lp->ptid)’ failed.
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.
Quit this debugging session? (y or n)
/build/buildd/gdb-6.3/gdb/linux-nat.c:1208: internal-error: wait_lwp: Assertion `pid == GET_LWP (lp->ptid)’ failed.
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.
Create a core file of GDB? (y or n)
It’s like watching a train wreck.
Boobs are in this year. last year it was taking various items of clothing off. this year, it’s having boobs.
Moldova was a pretty interesting entry. I think I’m hoping they win (writing this as watching the voting).
Although, the advert half way through for the “CD” of Eurovision 2005. Although there is no such thing – there is a copy protected disc that just happens to be partly compatible with some CD players. This stuff irritates me. I’m tempted to write to the ACCC about it. Really, people should not be lied to like this.
I think this can be done – with gaurenteed consistency – fairly efficiently.
would love to do some experiments and see what performance i could get.
write performance could be spectacular…
there’s some ideas floating in my head for read performance optimisation – i wonder if any of them make any sense.
due to travelling, i haven’t been to jiu jitsu for about a month. longest time i haven’t been since i started. missing doing it – esp while away. maybe should have found some local club or something.
anyway, aparrently there could be a qualification tourdament for grading tomorrow. so tonight i’m going to try to get to a class (before going to see Star Wars). I’ll probably be quite worn out by the end of it.
Two trips away and eating too much has probably done nothing for my fitness.
looking forward to feeling the pain.
okay, maybe not.
but getting on the mat will be great.
(insert disclaimer about this being my own ramblings and nothing to do with my employer)
Try and Buy, or Buy and Buy? :: AO
So, the Sybase CEO doesn’t get it.
The Sybase ‘free’ offering is in no way free. It is proprietary software that owns you.
Yes, Stallman was right – you do not own proprietary software, it owns you.
By giving the user the first hit for ‘free’ and placing an arbitrary limit on when they have to start to pay (and only pay you, so they have no real freedom of choice) ties the user in chains. It is not ‘express’, it is a demo – a cinema preview and nothing more.
This is nothing like the free copies of free software. It is merely a proprietary product packaged for a free software platform. Letting people live in a partial freedom. It’s an improvement, but is a gift to your customers (of partial freedom), not the free software community.
John Chen even says something that is totally misleading.
“You download it and develop it and use it…”
DEVELOP? What the? How can I download anything that lets me develop sybase? hrrmm.. they have the source up there? I don’t think so. I’m sure he meant ‘develop on top of it’. In other words, for a database, use it.
The MySQL way of “you can download it, develop it and use it” is just that. Download it, the source, actually hack the database, write a new storage engine, change the parser, the optimiser – hey, even go make it something that isn’t SQL (for example Fred’s Query Language or something). Or, if you’re just going to use it for your web site, just do that. You have the freedom.
MySQL AB (the company) makes money of being the most knowledgeable and well qualified group to provide knowledge, support, training and development of the MySQL database. We don’t hold our users hostage – they are free (all the freedoms granted to them under the GPL) to go support themselves, or get somebody else to, or even to go and develop the database themselves.
So, here’s to not holding your users hostage!
(this isn’t an attack on Sybase being a good database or not – i have never used it, i don’t think – and don’t really have an interest to. It’s an attack on proprietry software, and especially proprietary software throwing around the term ‘open source’ to try and look good. Proprietary software is what it is, and people should know what that is.)
Piano may be the key to mystery man from the sea – World – theage.com.au
Yes, that’s right folks – I’m conducting a poll. Post your comments in comments (duh).
If this man, found wandering, distressed, without a passport and unable (or unwilling) to speak was found in Australia, and was an Australian citizen – where do you think he would be deported to?
If you aren’t too good at geography, I offer the following canned responses:
a) Asia, somewhere small, possibly with a bunch of islands. He could be one of them
b) Middle east. It’s safe there now, we killed the evil doers.
c) Europe somewhere, those leftist weirdos.
d) a british boyband.
copyrighteous : ip/20050512-00.html
I enjoyed this tale – it has all these elements of truth, and even an element of absurdity!
Alas, that absurdity is truth as well.
taking a while to get over jetlag. also a bit sniffly – i bet that isn’t helping.
I’m only a couple of hours off local time now.
It could also have something to do with how easy it is for me to sleep in my own bed. for some reason, morning has never really appealed to me. especially when i’m warm and asleep.
I’m going to have to get some photos up from prague no doubt.
watch this space. i may even set up gallery or something intense like that.