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| Linux Debugging | |
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Date: 17/11/2003 | After using RH9 for a good 4 months now, I'm starting to get to the bottom of all the issues. Firsly I've switched off NPTL completely. As pretty much everything is not ready to use it. Like GDB and Valgrind which my life revolves around when I'm coding. So once that was sorted GDB v6 started sucking less, and could actually see the improvements over v5.3, and Valgrind mysteriously started working again. Which meant at the end of the day I found a number of new memory related bugs in LGI.
Pretty much all my apps had been crashing and hanging in really weird places, and GDB was absolutely no help in finding these errors. And without Valgrind I would probably have never found them, when Valgrind works it's brilliant. The one thing I do appreciate about the new version of GDB is it's ability to correctly display the stack with pthread calls in amongst the normal calls. However it's still quite common to get silly errors like "can't find thread info" or "no such process" or what not. It's really a toy debugger compared to M$'s Visual C++ debugger. I do miss being able to set breakpoints while the app is running and being able to view an entire class, with all it's members easily. But I guess being able to setup core dumping for post mortems is about the only advantage GDB has over VC++ 6. I have moved some of the dynamic shared library loading out of threads and put it into the main thread of Scribe (under Linux), which slows down the startup when you have plugins loaded but it should mean in the long term it's more stable. It seems that dlopen and dlclose are not that threadsafe. Heres hoping for someone to fix that in the 2.6 kernel. |
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| Eudora Mail Folders | |
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Date: 16/11/2003 | Two Scribe users have found that Eudora folders don't import well as MBOX files, which is what they advertise themselves to be.
I've looked into this 'abnormality' and found that the email stored in the folder file is incorrectly encoded. Eudora must discard the parts of the message that it doesn't want and then ignore the encoding errors and 'guess' the type of data stored in the body of the message. This is all fine for Eudora but I personally like standards. *hmph* Anyway I don't think it's going to kill Scribe to guess at the content type if it's wrong in the headers. I'll post a fix for this in the next release. |
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| Redhat 9 and NPTL = BAD | |
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Date: 9/11/2003 | It seems that my recent gripes about Linux are related to the new (and buggy) addition of Native POSIX Threading Library in Redhat 9 which I run on one of the Linux machines I use (not by choice mind you).
Bah! It's making my life miserable. Applications all over the place just refuse to work reliably. Including my own of course. *sigh* |
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| Bayesian Filtering | |
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Date: 5/11/2003 |  I've got about 4000 spam to train on, and I just started collecting stats. Seems to be working ok ;) |
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| Arrrgh!!!! | |
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Date: 4/11/2003 | My flaming hard drive died!
Peice 'o trash IBM drive... no I didn't store anything that valuable on an "IBM" drive ;) Just all my carefully encoded movies... *sob* And this is the replacement drive for the 1st one that died. |
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| One for the Windows Refugees | |
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Date: 3/11/2003 | Like most Windows refugees I use Mozilla (and no NOT firebird, cause it's still woefully buggy) and there is this little annoying thing that it does differently on linux to the windows build. When you (mostly accidently) click the middle mouse button Mozilla loads whatever is in the clipboard as a URL.
This is purely the most annoying thing about Mozilla. But there is hope! Type in "about:config" in the address bar, find the value "middlemouse.contentLoadURL", double click it and set it to false. Then just browse on in peace, safe from stray clicks. |
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