shaver

A big part of every programmer’s life is debugging. Easily the majority, in my experience, and I like to think that I’m not a lot worse than average at this programming thing. Given that so much time is spent on it, the tools used can have a material impact on the quality of life of a debugging programmer.

On Linux, the debugger of record is “gdb”:http://sources.redhat.com/gdb/, which is often to the practice of debugging as a gasoline aquarium is to fire prevention. I’ve been playing with “some C++ software”:http://www.zeroc.com/ice.html over the weekend, and this has given me occasion to experience the “joys of gdb”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22joys+of+gdb%22 anew:

(gdb) p *this
Segmentation fault

[...time passes, work is repeated, hopes build again...]

(gdb) p _server
Segmentation fault

Maybe “6.0″:http://sources.redhat.com/gdb/download/ANNOUNCEMENT will be better, but then maybe not:

Specifically, if you set a breakpoint in a constructor or a destructor, gdb will put a breakpoint in one of the versions, but your program may execute the other version. This makes it impossible to set breakpoints reliably in constructors or destructors.

I wonder how much MSVC costs around here.

“Mike”:http://neon.polkaroo.net/~mhoye/blarg/ gets a cookie for alerting me to a “security hole”:http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=14&t=31153 in Movable Type, which makes it possible to send email to anyone through the mt-send-entry.cgi thingy. Reminds me of the bad old days with “formmail”:http://www.mh-z.com/misc/formmailsecurityhole.html.

I also renamed the comment script to reduce the amount of comment spam we see here. Blah.

Goddamned spammers.

5 computers arrived for me today (3 of them mine, for “dogfood”:http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/dogfood.html work; one for each of Andrei and Vlad), and I set them up. Holy crap, is it loud and hot in this office. My machines seem to be perfectly happy — kudos, indeed, to the people responsible for the VNC installer in Fedora Core and for open-carpet! Andrei’s machine isn’t so happy, so I think he’ll be getting someone to replace part or all of it.

Tomorrow I get to finish setting up Lustre and pdsh and distcc and all the other nice toys for making use of a handful of machines, and then beat the crud out of them. And maybe find a way to make them quieter, good heavens. (more…)

This diary, and various other sites hosted on this machine, were experiencing some very slow web service for about 24 hours, for which I offer apologies. See, “Joe”:http://www.joeshaw.org and (much more significantly) “Nat”:http://www.nat.org were clever enough to get their sites listed on “OSNews”:http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5201, and that resulted in our poor little Apache serverpool getting pretty much stuffed. I’ve moved nat.org to its own server pool now, so once the DNS records propagate things should be pretty much back to normal. Many thanks to Dan from “island.net”:http://www.island.net/, for his unreasonably-quick response to my DNS-update pleas.

Today I called my wife to see how she was. She had a headache. I told her that I purchased three computers today — which is true. I think she took it pretty well, all things considered.

I was going to go to NYC this weekend, to visit George and hang out at the “GNOME conference”:http://www.nylxs.com/events/gnome/, relax a little, you know. Earlier this week, though, I decided that I’m not really sufficiently back to my usual self to engage in high-density travel, so I cancelled those plans. I was looking forward to seeing all those crazy folks, but I think this was the right decision. There’s always the new year, and suchlike.

Apropos nothing whatsoever, I think Madhava and Beltzner will appreciate “this visualization of election results”:http://www.style.org/mappingvotes/. Don’t you?

What’s more fun than the Pope? The pope with a giant kitten. (Or, honestly, even a small one, on a stick.) There are more. So, “so many more”:http://nohands.bakesnake.com/.

(Via “Scattershot”:http://www.lynchwalker.com/.)

(Edit: direct links to the images didn’t work, bah.)

Apparently Fox has seen something resembling the light, and they’re now considering “bringing back Family Guy”:http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2003-11-18-family-guy_x.htm. 35 frickin’ episodes!

As if that weren’t sweet enough, it looks like “these guys”:http://www.trackmaniagame.com/ are remaking “Stunts”:http://www.kalpen.de/stunts/allabout.htm.

The demo is shaping up nicely, and some of the far-flung CFS crew are chipping in to extend the geographical reach of the filesystem in question. I put together a little ball of networking twine and “UML”:http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/ bubblegum to contribute a Canadian mount:

bash-2.05b# df -h /mnt/lustre
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
sc03_dual_eth3         15T  1.3T   12T  10% /mnt/lustre

Robert and Eric managed to also join us from California and Bristol, but the main demo component will be joining the party over the impressive “SC2003 WAN”:http://weathermap.sc03.org/sc03wmap.html.

I fixed some real bugs today, too, so a good show all around.

This past weekend featured the 7th and final Annual 711 Crawford Cocktail Party, of which there is now photographic evidence available from both “Anatole”:http://neon.polkaroo.net/~papadop/pics/moulinrouge/ and “Madhava”:http://madhava.com/photo/cocktail2003/.

“Some things”:http://www.dribbleglass.com/subpages/strange/cabbages.htm just don’t go together, but I think it’s clear that “Tyla and I do”:http://neon.polkaroo.net/~papadop/pics/moulinrouge/mrouge_0114.JPG.

Copious and insufficient thanks to our ever-gracious hosts, for their tireless and classy efforts.