Notes and Jottings

I’ve submitted my first patch to the Mozilla project, for [bug 206746](http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206746). Definitely not a difficult patch to write, but a bit of a milestone in terms of my actually getting anything written outside of work!

It’s actually an example of where it can be good to have the source code for a product you use. My problem was that labels in Mozilla mail would not be saved to the IMAP server in work, which made them almost useless for me. Now it’ll be possible to use them properly, making life better for everybody
[Next project?](http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141369) Sounds like it could be interesting to implement…

First Japanese language class over! Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyu, jyu.

Hajimemashite. Watashi wa Gary desu. Watashi wa Airurando-jin desu. Dozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu.

And for this week, we just have to learn the first five characters of the hiragana… あいうえお

As you might say, では また。

As reported “by Justin”:http://taint.org/2003/10/01/191947a.html, spammers are now using *closed relays*, by using brute force attacks against usernames/passwords. And there’s a virus on the loose which is even nastier…

This is a really bad turn for the worse—I can’t expect people to _ever_ select strong passwords, and SMTP AUTH was our last best hope.

Vince gets a house, a house, a “very cool house”:http://crinisvilla.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_crinisvilla_archive.html#106454844822270041. Yeah it’s old news, but to that.

Hmm… if only I could visit for Hallowe’en

A [new version of GLIBC which supports NPTL](http://lists.debian.org/debian-glibc/2003/debian-glibc-200310/msg00063.html) is now available from the experimental repository for Debian. It’s so strange to see only one process reported for nautilus or mozilla now… but pleasant.

I’m looking forward to doing more extensive tests on the new threading implementation, with a multithreaded mail server I do a few bits and pieces with from time to time. General scalability comparisons with a 2.4 kernel would be interesting, especially since I consider 2.4 threading to suck. As it stands, Solaris is by far the most capable and used platform on which to run threaded applications. It was one of Linux’s big disadvantages up until now. Along with a slightly light-hearted implementation of NFS when used for enterprise-level purposes.

There were one or two problems on the way to getting the new GLIBC up and running. Firstly, _iconv -l_ would report that it could only convert between a small number of character sets. Solution? Get a copy of _/usr/lib/gconv/gconv-modules_ from another Linux box, as it appears to be missing from libc6 package 2.3.2.dsl-1. This makes _gnome-terminal_ and _nautilus_ work again.

Also, djbdns and daemontools use _extern int errno_ instead of _#include <errno.h>_, which causes them to fail at runtime (for previously-compiled binaries), or at compile-time (if attempting to compile against the latest libc headers). One just has to change one line in _error.h_, recompile, and it’ll work. I can see this issue causing breakage for a lot more applications though…

NPTL will make such a difference anyway—core dumps which have information from all threads! Proper POSIX signal handling! One PID for the whole process! Not to mention the huge improvements in speed over the old linuxthreads implementation.

“Grin!”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002107.html For the full story, have a look at “this article”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2089017/.

I’ll just mention that we went out for Robert’s birthday on Saturday night to “Monty’s of Kathmandu”:http://www.montys.ie/ on Eustace Street. There were nine of us there, and the bill (including bottles of wine etc.) came to a bit over €300—seemed like quite good value. It has great-tasting Nepalese food, so could be worth going to. And the starter was yum!