Geek Drivel

Darn. I was hoping it was true, and apparently I wasn’t alone. Maybe the Mafia’s PR department spread the story.

An associate and I have been using Pidgin (formerly GAIM), with the Off The Record (OTR) plug-in, to securely collaborate on Project X. Although OTR worked, there were times that it didn’t work very well… longer messages got errors instead of being transmitted properly, and some days it didn’t seem to want to work at all.

Yesterday, my associate discovered that there was a new version of it available, which claimed to solve these problems. I agreed that we should update it, and we each began to do so. It took him just a couple minutes — he’s using Windows, and there was a Windows installer already built for him. I’m still using Ubuntu “Feisty Fawn” 7.04, and since newer versions of OTR weren’t available in the repositories I know of, the only way I could see to get it was via source code, something I haven’t often had to do. The older version was really causing trouble, so I gritted my teeth and picked up the source code.
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We’ll get that Dick Tracy watch down to a usable size sooner or later.

I’d be a little less happy after the machine decided that I only needed a tiny portion.

E-mail is a wonderful invention. I’ve been using it since 1987 or thereabouts, when one of my uncles gave me a 300 baud acoustic modem that I could plug into my Sinclair QL, and I discovered the local FidoNet node.

However, this wonderful innovation started becoming a burden about a decade ago — that’s when I started noticing the spam and virus problem anyway. Between spammers and scammers, it became all but unusable for a long time. Now it’s back to usable proportions, thanks to technological innovations, but the messages that still get through are the most carefully crafted ones, and the most dangerous. It doesn’t have to be this way though.
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As someone who uses two monitors in the office, I found today’s Dilbert comic strip very amusing. Bu-wa-haha!

For all those who’ve ever played Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, you can stop now. She’s been found.

Last weekend I ported some MD5 calculation code to Lisp, for practice. But once it was done, I wasn’t happy with it, so I’ve been improving it since.
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My company is still on contract to help out with a program we developed, which another company bought a few years ago. I’ve spent part of the last two weeks working with that company’s lead programmer, trying to track down a minor but particularly pernicious intermittent bug involving TCP/IP, multithreading, and what seemed to be a timing-related deadlock. What’s worse, this program (because of it’s nature) can’t be debugged in a standard debugger — we’re reduced to using printf statements and imagination — and the problem disappears when a particular debugging printf statement is enabled.

We still hadn’t managed it when he left on Friday, so I tackled it again Sunday morning, and finally discovered the source of the problem: a deadlock between two threads, both of which had locked part of a resource and were trying to lock the other part. It didn’t happen when the debugging statement was there because that statement delayed that thread just enough to prevent it.

This kind of problem never appeared in single-threaded programs, and rarely appeared even in multithreaded ones before we had multiprocessor systems.

Software development tools, and software developers, have gotten a lot more sophisticated in the time that I’ve been writing code. But in some areas, the hardware technology is still way ahead of our ability to use it well.

Another Windows Vista love note. Wake up, Microsoft!