Makura no Soshi

After I could not make it last year I was glad to come back to Chemnitz for this years Linux-Tage.

This time I did not have any talk and did not sign up for the BSD booth. So I had more time and attended more talks than usual and the (possibly subjective) impression that talks were better than in previous years. The only (small) drawback of success: with ever more guests everything becomes more crowded.

One particularly interesting presentation was the one on structured logging by Jens Kühnel. — That is more or less the long overdue follow-up for my very old talk on Syslog (pdf).

I have been quite lazy with my PGP key. At some time I even removed its expiration date, because I was too busy to generate a new one. But lazy or not… a key of 1024 bits has to be considered legacy now, furthermore it is time to remove my different university addresses.

So this years resolution is to switch to a new key — which is now online on my contact page and public keyserver. (The old one is also online and still usable for some time).

A nice surprise last week: textproc/libcrm114 became my first official FreeBSD port.  :-)

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Every now and then the Snort mailing lists get “homework questions” like how to learn about the program’s architecture. IMHO the most helpful books for a more detailed insight are:

• Debugging with gdb
• Ryan Schmidt’s gdb Debugger Tutoria

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I am quite happy about this announcement of a new Psi release from the Delta XMPP Project. I was afraid my favorite XMPP/Jabber client was dead and I had to look for a new one.

While searching for the project status I also found the OTR plugin I missed for some time now. Now my only remaining problem is the IPv6 support. ;-)

One subsystem of a PHP server is its session handling. In multi user systems the choice of handlers requires a tradeoff between performance, persistence, and security/user isolation. Because my setup does not seem to be common I document it here. Read the rest of this entry »

The minted package is a possible alternative to listing. It provides syntax highlighting for sourc code in LaTeX documents by calling the Python pygmentize tool.
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As the name says CUnit is an xUnit implementation for the C programming language.

In comparison to dynamic programming languages the test organization requires much more manual glue code. Because C has no introspection one has to register every test case manually. Likewise there is no support for utilities like mock object generation or annotations.

On the other hand unit tests can be very useful in C, for example when implementing data structures. Test cases may isolate null pointer dereferencing and one can use valgrind on them to detect memory leaks at the lowest level.

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