Sometimes things do 'Just Work'

and contrary to popular belief they aren't always Microsoft Products. I reinstalled XP on a desktop the other day (so I can do some cross-platform pyGTK programming). Its a plain-jayne Celeron 2.9GHz machine that I picked up on sale at Tiger Direct a few months back. Wouldn't you know it, XP hasn't got a clue as to how to install the Audio drivers. After digging about for a considerable amount of time I finally came up with the motherboard CD and got that working.

Then I tried DVD playback, I wanted to watch Firefly while cleaning my guns. I had bought a $15 license for a Sonic DVD codec when I bought WinXP online. I downloaded the package from Sonic (I had printed out the instructions so I knew it was right!). The darn thing didn't work! Windows Media Player still says it ain't got a clue as to how to play the DVD.

Under Linux I use Xine to play DVDs, but it hasn't been ported to Windows. But Mplayer has. Ironically I can never get mplayer to work properly under Linux. On Windows it was a different stopry entierly. I downloaded the Windows pre-compiled binary and a full load of codecs. Unzip the binary to c:\ and the codecs into the c:\mplayer\codecs directory. Then run mplayer dvd:// from a command window and off you go!

Now I have a clean gun and Windows XP that can play DVD's without having to bother with those damn closed apps that won't even work with your legal license. So how do I get my $15 back from Sonic?

Islamist Hackers Target Michelle Malkin

According to Michelle Malkin the peace-loving Islamist movement has been trying to take down her blog, probably because she has been showing those horrible disgusting cartoons of their so-called prophet. Look at the cartoons and compare them to some of the things that have been drawn and displayed about the Christian faith in recent decades.
If Christians were as 'peace loving' as the Muslims appear to be we'd have had riots in the streets 20 years ago over crosses dipped in urine and paid for with tax-payer money. But we didn't.

Think about that.

Watch those old scripts

There's a popular perl script for processing web forms into emails. It has some checks to make sure it cannot be used to send spam. Except that it didn't check enough.

The Subject form field can be exploited to send a spam message by sending a subject, followed by a \n and then the headers and body of a spam message. This has been fixed in this version. But the subtag field may still be used to explot this script (maybe, I haven't tried it).

So, it pays to go over what you are posting on your webpage, especially if it was written by someone else.

Backwards compatibility?

One of the great features of Unix is that the small apps that you use to build applications change very slowly, if at all, over time. ESR makes the point in "The Art of Unix Programming" that programs should maintain compatibility. Well, I guess that's no longer true. I'm trying to build some rpms for one of my projects and both tar and rpmbuild no longer work the same way they did a year ago (yep, the code is stable and I haven't built a new release in over a year).

tar has changed how 'strict' it is about accepting arguments like --exclude. It used to handle it fine if they were at the end of the argument list. No longer. And rpmbuild is barfing on the Copyright: entry in the .spec file of all things.

I really, really dislike fighting with my tools. Especially on Unix which has historically been the most stable and reliable of the OSes.