ptalk > November 2005

Open Petard

Interesting intersection between open source and Sony’s copy protection.

Sony may have stepped into something they will really regret. It seems the open source community has discovered that they used (in violation of the open source copyright) open source software in their rootkit that supposedly is there just to enforce their own copyrights. Talk about getting hoisted by your own petard…

Spyware Sony seems to breach copyright

Bad 2 Verse

What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn’t notice Sony’s rootkit as it infected half a million computers? And this isn’t one of those lightning-fast internet worms; this one has been spreading since mid-2004. Because it spread through infected CDs, not through internet connections, they didn’t notice? This is exactly the kind of thing we’re paying those companies to detect — especially because the rootkit was phoning home.

Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit

Did you feel it?

If you felt the earthquake in Plymouth, MA today, the USGS would like to know what you felt:

Event fnbb_05 Questionnaire

[I wasn’t home, so I missed the excitement. I thought these were only supposed to happen on the left coast? But this makes the second quake in my blog.]

Whine before Perl

I needed to write a couple of simple scripts the other day. One to create a p4 change template that followed our guidelines; another to format review email from that change template.

Every time I write something like this, I start off with sed, because it is so simple, then I realize it is too simple, and I try to remember awk, but then realize if I am going to use awk, I might as well use perl. I know perl is the best (in the sense of worse is better!) tool for tasks like this, but it is so grotty that I refuse to learn it and it always takes me an hour of flipping through the perl manual to remember its bizarre syntax.

Some day someone ought to design a clean version of perl where there is only one way to do things.