urwhatu

gruber

Putting Gruber to work once. For your entertainment, putting Gruber to work all the time (a growl style).

How THE Dan Evans rolls

We use 37Signals' campfire and love it. Occasionally (!?), a LOLcat will show up in our discussions.

Thus, the illustrious Dan Evans presents our new icon (catfire):

Technorati Tags: 37signals, lolcat, campfire

Mach-O Magic

Probably old humor to many, new to me:

stechert@kirin:~/Repositories/perforce/current/UnixBuild/swig [1140] $ otool -h _splunkswig.so 
_splunkswig.so:
Mach header
      magic cputype cpusubtype   filetype ncmds sizeofcmds      flags
 0xfeedface       7          3          8    16       2264 0x0001a085

Makes me think we missed an opportunity with our magic:

stechert@kirin:~/Scratch/bproblem [1157] $ od -N 7 -a 1143222000-1143220421-21680121.tsidx 
0000000    S   p   l   u   n   k   3

Technorati Tags: humor, Programming

Getting the Saved UID of a Process on OS X

If, like me, you were reading Setuid Demystified and thought "Wow, this is great, but it's got to work on OS X too, and there's no getresuid() or /proc/$pid/cred, so how do I use their proposed API?", then this code snippet is for you. It retrieves the saved set-user-id of a process on OS X, letting you populate the read_suid_from_X OS-specific function that's stubbed out in Chen and Wagner's code.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/sysctl.h>

int main()
{
        int retval, mib[4];
        struct kinfo_proc kp;
        size_t len;

        len = sizeof(kp);

        mib[0] = CTL_KERN;
        mib[1] = KERN_PROC;
        mib[2] = KERN_PROC_PID;
        mib[3] = getpid();

        retval = sysctl(mib, 4, &kp, &len, NULL, 0);
        if (retval == -1)
                return 1;

        if (len <= 0)
                return 2;

        printf("%u\n", kp.kp_eproc.e_pcred.p_svuid);

        return 0;
}

Technorati Tags: OSX, suid

Rongo-Rongo Product Management

File this one under "product management peeves" next to venga-ization.

Michael Kaplan writes about his early adventures supporting different layout directions for writing. He starts out with very real needs to support bidirectional writing systems and voluntarily added several others (boustrophedon and the various vertical writing systems). When done and asked "What languages does it support?" he accurately replied "It'll support anything but Rongo-Rongo". I leave as an exercise to the reader what showed up in the next version of the requirements. I dare you to tell me this hasn't happened to you - and why? Because it's harder to figure out what users actually need than to just ask for "more, more!". I'm looking forward to referencing Ogham and Mayan as missing features the next time I'm faced with this kind of nincompoopery.

Technorati Tags: nincompoopery, Product Management

zomg feedburner hotness

I just discovered link splicing and photo splicing at FeedBurner. OMG, the hotness. Once-a-day link updates from Furl and photo splicing from Flickr are now in effect. Which leads me to the tagline of the day:

Feedburner: If you're not using it you're either uninformed or stupid :-).

Technorati Tags: splicing, feedburner

Autoconf Macro for libarchive

Tim Kientzle's excellent libarchive just works. On lots of platforms. And it has the right license. Thanks, dude. Here's an autoconf macro for your stone soup.

st_lib_archive.m4

Technorati Tags: Programming, autoconf

htonl, ntohl: where are you?

One of the most irritating things about cross-platform programming is that so many of the differences between systems are utterly pointless. Witness the header files you have to include to get the standard network-byte-order to host-byte-order functions into your library:

Solaris:

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <inttypes.h>

Linux:

#include <netinet/in.h>

Mac OS X:

#include <arpa/inet.h>

OpenBSD:

#include <sys/types.h>

FreeBSD:

#include <arpa/inet.h>

or

#include <netinet/in.h>

How stupid is that? netinet/in.h looks like it almost might work, but in reality there are many supporting functions that cause all hell to break loose if you don't use these particular sets of include files. Once the lack of a long long network/host byte conversion routine gets thrown in, it's easier just to roll your own, which is what I ended up doing a few months ago for one of the libraries I work on.

Technorati Tags: Programming, Splunk

Yuna

Yuna Felice Stechert was born at 5:16 AM, Saturday April 1st, after about 8 hours of labor. She weighed 6 pounds 9 ounces (2890 grams) and was 58 centimeters long. Mommy Natsuko is finally starting to feel a little better after a very tough night (and subsequent week). It is amazing how quickly time flies by now.

Technorati Tags: Stechert

The Path to Mediocrity

Highly recommended quick reading: Death by Risk Aversion.  Collins says something similar in "Built to Last" about betting the farm every so often, using Boeing as an example.  Clayton Christensen says almost exactly this in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma".  Yet, so many people (managers and employees) still make this mistake.

Technorati Tags: Management