{ dubovsky.com rantings }

Two things you never ever want to see in a chunk of (production) C/C++ code:

void someReadFunction(char *buf, size_t buflen)
{
   ...
   pos = -1;
end:
   buf[pos] = '\\0';
   return pos;
}

And no, the programmer wasn’t advancing buf in the omitted part of the function.

Dethroner has a cute little post about diner coffee. An excerpt:

Let me tell you why coffee — even the scalding devil’s spunk of truck stop pots — is a precious, positive force.

No one without hope ever drinks coffee. If you put a cup to your lips, you’ve made a tacit acknowledgment that you expect life to get just a little bit better. If you’re hung over, coffee is the first, scrambling step towards level. On the long road, coffee is the assumption that you’ll make a few more miles. Coffee is the signal to an antagonist world that you’re ready to stand up for one more day.

No other liquid, not even our Dread Lord Beer, carries with it so much implicit optimism. If beer is heaven, coffee is faith.

The next time you’re forced to choke back swill in lieu of a proper cup of hand-wrought coffee in full bouquet, try not to think of what you’re missing; instead appreciate the unadorned truth in your hand: a molten, metallic distillation of hope.

Dethroner’s recent series on coffee (beans, tasting, equipment, and general thoughts) has some good ideas in it. I recommend reading it if you’ve missed it (start with Why Not Great Coffee?). My favorite bit of pure entertainment from the group: video of making free-poured latte art.

Linus Torvalds has a wonderful response to a proposed Linux kernel patch that would disallow loading proprietary (non-GPL-compatible-licensed) kernel modules. This is no particular surprise, given Linus’s pragmatic nature, but it illustrates a good point about DRM: it is impossible to determine fair use algorithmically. The difference between a fair use and an illegal one are outside the realm of software. To quote his response:

The fact is, the reason I don’t think we should force the issue is very simple: copyright law is simply better off when you honor the admittedly gray issue of “derived work”. It’s gray. It’s not black-and-white. But being gray is good. Putting artificial black-and-white technical counter-measures is actually bad. It’s bad when the RIAA does it, it’s bad when anybody else does it.

Technical solutions to social problems don’t work and never will.

One of my favorite bands, the Barenaked Ladies have a new album, Barenaked Ladies Are Me, out on their own label. (NPR’s Weekend Edition had a good interview (RealAudio or windows media formats only; sorry) with them on Saturday.) Along with the normal CD and LP formats, the album can be had via download (MP3 or FLAC) and on a USB flash drive. The (256 MB) flash drive contains all the tracks, plus videos and such. It’s good to see established artists embracing new ways of distributing music and engaging their fans, and BNL has been at the forefront of the movement for quite some time.

Yeah, flash sucks, but that’s all we get for the moment.

Microsoft made available a download of a Virtual PC image of a stripped-down Windows XP install and IE6 (if you pass a Genuine Advantage check on your machine), allowing web developers to test sites against IE6 (which does not co-exist peacefully with IE7). I’ll avoid pointing out the obvious problems with their system, but thought the following might interest to people who develop on other platforms. Add:

• one Microsoft Virtual PC (free as in beer)
• one Win XP and IE6 virtual PC hard-drive image (not free, but zero dollars if you own Windows)
• one VMware Virtual Machine Importer 2 (free as in beer)

and you get a VMware server image of WinXP and IE6 that you can run under any OS supported by VMware, which is to say just about any.

Steps, to make it clear (this all happens on a Windows machine):

1. Unpack the VPC image of WinXP and IE6.
2. Install Virtual PC.
3. When Virtual PC prompts you, create a new virtual machine; at the prompt for what storage to use, choose the “pre-existing hard drive” option and point VPC to the file you unpacked in the above step. This will create a .vpc file (typically in My Documents/My Virtual Machines).
4. Run VMware Virtual Machine Importer and import the newly-created .vpc file from the previous step. In a few minutes, you’ll have a VMware machine image you can then use on any OS.