After the fuss of the last two weeks because of CVE-2010-3081 and CVE-2010-3301, I decided to take a look at a handful of the high-profile privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Linux from the last few years. So, here's a summary of the ones I picked out. There are also a large number of smaller ones, like an AF\_CAN exploit, or the…
26 Sept 2010
21 Sept 2010
17 Sept 2010
Nachdem ich vor ein paar Wochen den Artikel über Spring für Azubis veröffentlicht habe, wird es heute Zeit für “Apache Tomcat für Azubis”. Dieser Artikel hat nicht ansatzweise den Anspruch, die komplette Konfiguration eines Tomcat-Servers zu beschreiben – dafür ist die offizielle Dokumentation gedacht. Hier geht es darum die grobe […] The post Apache Tomcat für Azubis appeared first on…
Area 51 is filling up with thousands of ideas for new Stack Exchange sites, and a pretty clear pattern has started to worry us: too many ridiculously… Read more "Merging Season"
13 Sept 2010
A Minute With Brendan is going great. I wanted to post a quick link to it for those of you who may have missed it. Good use of HTML5 <audio> too. Thanks to @Voodootikigod for producing it. The latest episode is about ES5 strict mode, stressing the importance of verifying that "use strict"; does what … Continue reading "A Minute…
12 Sept 2010
I really like Twitter. I think it’s a great, fun, service, that helps enable interesting online communities, and is a surprisingly effective way to spread news and information to lots of people online. One of the things that I’ve loved about Twitter is their API, and how open and welcoming they’ve been to developers. I even use Twitter from an…
5 Sept 2010
I’m at Dragon*Con this weekend, my second time here now. I decided that if I was going to Dragon*Con again, I needed to do something in terms of costuming, and I wanted it to be something unique – I wasn’t going to come anywhere near as epic as some of the costumes people pull off, but I wanted something that…
2 Sept 2010
The Stack Overflow Blog: “The Unix world loves to take sides. I don’t have to blog about this; Freud already did, in 1930. He called it ‘the… Read more "Fork it!"
31 Aug 2010
Flashing my old Nokia 770 device to the latest 2008er Hacker edition under Ubuntu 10.0x drove my crazy. Here are steps which brought success: Download the latest flash utility otherwise you will receive the message Invalid flashing API version (1) Download 2008 Hacker Edition execute on command line and wait. […] The post Flashing Nokia 770 appeared first on schakko.de.
We’ve been opening new Stack Exchanges left and right on a variety of topics. In almost every case, the Stack Exchange appears to duplicate the content of… Read more "A new WordPress Stack Exchange"
A few days ago a small team of SoundCloud developers (@goldjunge, @jberkel, @purzelrakete and @sohm) participated in the first node.js…
29 Aug 2010
Basically anyone who’s used Linux for any amount of time eventually comes to know and love the strace command. strace is the system-call tracer, which traces the calls that a program makes into the kernel in order to interact with the outside world. If you’re not already familiar with this incredibly versatile tool, I suggest you go check out my…
27 Aug 2010
If you’re a JavaScript head, we’ve got something for you. SoundCloud now supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing, using XMLHttpRequest. Or…
26 Aug 2010
Our very cool devs Matas and Hannes. With over 15 developers working on the SoundCloud site nowadays, we’re pumping out a steady stream of…
24 Aug 2010
One of the best “researchy” investments we’ve made at Mozilla over the last few years has been in static analysis, both for C++ (including Taras Glek‘s excellent Dehydra, with which you write the custom analysis in JS) and now for JS itself: DoctorJS is based on Dimitris Vardoulakis‘s work this summer implementing CFA2 for JavaScript … Continue reading "Static Analysis…
22 Aug 2010
Ich stand heute vor dem Problem, dass ich mit einem AspectJ-Advice die Parameter von Methoden überprüfen wollte. Abhängig von dem Parametertyp sollte eine Exception geworfen werden. Meine Exceptions erben von einer Basisklasse, die in Abhängigkeit des Parametertyps weitere Exception-Codes enthalten. So kann z.B. die UserException neben dem Code NOT_FOUND (Parameter […] The post AspectJ und Spring: Parameter einer Methode auslesen…
For the past 6 months, I have had regular discussions with an experienced Java developers who switched to Ruby a couple years ago. Names have been changed to protect the guilty but to help you understand my friend ‘Duke’ better, you need to know that he has been a developer for 10 years and lead many complicated, high traffic projects.…
19 Aug 2010
Sometimes I think a pretty good business model would be to copy the applications that 37signals makes, but make them more complex. More features, more promises—generally, just… Read more "Simplicity vs. Choice"
15 Aug 2010
In response to my query last time, ezyang asked for any tips or tricks I have for finding my way around the Linux kernel. I’m not sure I have much in the way of systematic advice for tracking down the answers to questions about the Linux kernel, but thinking about what I do when posed with a patch to Linux…
9 Aug 2010
A couple of weeks ago I attended the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland. OSCON has hundreds of sessions and activities focused on all aspects of open source software. I met some great people, the talks were good and I saw some promising ideas and technologies. Workshops attended Android for Java Developers Marko Gargenta […]
Yesterday, BoingBoing posted an article with a new Facebook Icon for "Meh" Button, opposed to "Like". Inspired by this, PubNub developers built the Facebook
8 Aug 2010
I haven’t been feeling very motivated to blog lately – I’ve missed the last two weeks of Iron Blogger, and I’m not totally enthusiastic about any of the items on my “to blog” list. But, I do enjoy blogging when I actually get into posts, and I’d like to keep updating this blog. So, in a bit of a copout,…
Für mein aktuelles Projekt setze ich u.a. JPA/EclipseLink, Maven und Spring. Damit der Build-Prozess von Maven und das automatische Deployen in den Tomcat-Container von Eclipse funktioniert, musste ich ein paar Änderungen an der .settings/org.eclipse.wst.common.component durchführen: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <project-modules id="moduleCoreId" project-version="1.5.0"> <wb-module deploy-name="YourProject"> <wb-resource deploy-path="/" source-path="/src/main/webap
29 Jul 2010
Recently I was tasked with finding how to optimize a web application with heavy traffic. The application (a Rails 2.3.x app) gets about 3 million requests per hour and most of these requests cannot really be easily cached so they go through the entire stack. This is probably not the case of most web apps out there. None the less,…
28 Jul 2010
Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed
Steve YeggeEYJAFJÖLL, ICELAND — Java programmers around the globe are in a panic today over a Wikileaks press release issued at 8:15am GMT. Wikileaks announced that they will re-release the source code for thousands of Open Source Java projects, making all access modifiers 'public' and all classes and members non-'final'. Agile Java Developer Johnnie Garza of Irvine, CA condemns the move.…
26 Jul 2010
Einen meiner Azubis habe ich vor einigen Wochen die Aufgabe gegeben, sein in Java geschriebenes Website-Crawler Tool auf Spring zu portieren. Dabei kam es dann logischerweise zu einigen Fragen und Pitfalls, über die man als Spring-Neuling stolpert. In diesem Artikel will ich auf die Hürden bei der Entwicklung mit Spring […] The post Spring Framework für Azubis: Tutorial appeared first…
22 Jul 2010
Da ich gegenwärtig an libopenranked von etqw-openranked arbeite und ich vermute, dass ich meine Erkenntnisse nach einiger Zeit wieder vergesse, gibt es hier die Kurzfassung. Damit bei einem Segmentation Fault eine Core-Dump erzeugt wird, muss ulimit -c unlimited aufgerufen. Damit wird festgelegt, dass der Core-Dump beliebig groß sein darf. Mit […] The post Debugging von C-Applikationen unter Linux appeared first…
21 Jul 2010
It’s good to be back. I let the old blog field lie fallow in order to focus on work in Ecma TC39 (JS standards), Firefox 3.5, 3.6 and 4; and recently on a new project that I’ll blog about soon. In the mean time [UPDATE and in case the embedded video fails], here’s the video … Continue reading "A Brief…
18 Jul 2010
I’m pretty sure every developer who has ever worked with a modern database-backed application, particularly a web-app, has a love/hate relationship with their ORM, or object-relational mapper. On the one hand, ORMs are vastly more pleasant to work with than code that constructs raw SQL, even, generally, from a tool that gives you an object model to construct SQL, instead…
16 Jul 2010
We launched three new Stack Exchange sites this week! Gaming Cooking Pro Webmasters We’ll have three more for you next week, too.
15 Jul 2010
Well! I've sure had a nice relaxing blog-free year. No worries, no haters, no Nooglers wandering by my office and staring at me through the window as if they expect me to crap in my hand and hurl it at them. Not that I wasn't tempted. Nope, it's just been peace and quiet and reading and coding and practicing my…
13 Jul 2010
Für mein gegenwärtiges Freizeit-Projekt OpenRanked war es nötig, dass ich beim Starten der Applikation (Stand-Alone Anwendung ohne Anwendungsserver) ein Pfad zu einer .properties-Datei mit den Einstellungen des Servers übergeben konnte. Damit nun die übergebene .properties-Datei auch in der richtigen zeitlichen Reihenfolge geladen werden konnte, ist folgender Code-Schnipsel nötig: // _xmlFiles […] The post Spring: Properties für eine Applikation vor Starten…
12 Jul 2010
“We decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and… Read more "Domain Names"
7 Jul 2010
Empowering users to become awesome: The key to great products.
Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email? Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange… Read more "Web Applications Stack Exchange now in beta"
4 Jul 2010
Last time, I announced Check Plus, a declarative language for defining Check tests in C. This time, I want to talk about the tricks I used to implement a declarative minilanguage using the C preprocessor (and some GCC extensions). The Problem We want to write some toplevel declarations that look like: #define SUITE_NAME example BEGIN_SUITE("Example test suite"); #define TEST_CASE core…
Hin und wieder kann es vorkommen, dass der pop3proxy der Sophos UTM (ehemals Astaro) die eingehenden E-Mails “verschluckt”. Grund dafür ist der Spamassassin, der im Hintergrund läuft und bei bestimmten E-Mails eine extrem hohe Prozessorlast verursacht. Das Verhalten habe ich jetzt einige Male bei E-Mails beobachtet, die über die Bugtraq-Mailingliste […] The post How-To: Mail-Queue in Sophos UTM pop3proxy flushen/löschen…
30 Jun 2010
28 Jun 2010
Fix black screen after installation of nvidia-current on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx / Aspire 5935G
SchakkoToday afternoon I installed nvidia-current on my Aspire 54935G because I had the intend to dive into CUDA. After the installation via apt-get nvidia-current – I use Ubuntu 10.04 – and a reboot the display only showed the kernel messages. While starting X the screen turned to black and I […] The post Fix black screen after installation of nvidia-current…
Neil has posted a video of Don Norman (most famous for his book The Design of Everyday Things) speaking at the Business of Software conference last year… Read more "Don Norman at the Business of Software 2009"
26 Jun 2010
Check is an excellent unit-testing framework for C code, used by a number of relatively well-known projects. It includes features such as running all tests in separate address spaces (using fork(2)), which means that the test suite can properly report segfaults or similar crashes without the test runner crashes. My main complaint about Check is that (unsurprisingly for a framework…
22 Jun 2010
Area 51 is now in beta. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites. Benofsky from Hacker News writes:… Read more "Area 51 is now in beta"
20 Jun 2010
A few weeks ago, I wrote that software engineers should keep lab notebooks as they work, in addition to just documenting things after the fact. Today, I’m going to share the techniques that I’ve found useful to try to get in the habit of lab-notebooking my work, even though I still feel like I could be better at writing things…
17 Jun 2010
PubNub JavaScript Push API 2.0 now with jQuery Plugin! If you are a jQuery user and wanted a Push API with Publish and Subscribe, then hurray!
15 Jun 2010
Vor einigen Tagen kam bei Stackoverflow ein Thread über Informatiker-Spüche/Abkürzungen zustande. Hier meine Best-Ofs, die ich zwar auch schon getweetet hatte, aber egal: Spectagular Expression – A cleverly done, very useful regex Worning: it works but with warnings Company Whore – a module or a piece of code, every programmer […] The post Informatiker-Humor: Die besten Sprüche und Abkürzungen appeared…
Microsoft Outlook und RSS: “Der RSS-Inhalt kann von Outlook nicht über ‘https://…’ verarbeitet werden. Der Hyperlink zeigt möglicherweise nicht auf eine gültige RSS-Quelle.”
SchakkoUnser Build-Server stellt einen RSS-Feed mit den letzten Subversion-Commits bereit. Nach einer internen Umstellung der Einstellungen ist der Feed dabei nicht mehr über HTTP sondern über HTTPS zu erreichen. Wenn man nun versucht, diesen Feed in den internen Feed-Reader von Outlook aufzunehmen, erscheint die Fehlermeldung Der RSS-Inhalt kann von Outlook […] The post Microsoft Outlook und RSS: “Der RSS-Inhalt kann…
13 Jun 2010
One of the major reasons I can’t stand webapps is because I’m a serious emacs junkie, and I can’t edit text in anything that doesn’t have decent emacs keybindings. Fortunately, on Linux, at least, GTK provides basic emacs keybindings if you add gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" to your .gtkrc-2.0. However, some webapps think that they deserve total control over your keys,…
11 Jun 2010
At PubNub, we use Google Closure Advanced Optimizations Mode, Max Gzipping -9 and Memcache for best possible performance of JavaScript.
9 Jun 2010
My friend Noam at Harvard Business School does annual surveys of executive compensation in tech companies. The surveys are a great way to figure out how much… Read more "My secret weapon for setting executive compensation"
8 Jun 2010
Paul Kenny is a regular speaker at the Business of Software. He’s an expert on sales, especially high tech sales, and both Red Gate and Fog Creek… Read more "Paul Kenny’s talk at the Business of Software 2009"
6 Jun 2010
Most of the projects I've been working on today have fairly strict code review policies. My work requires code review on most of our code, and as we bring on an army of interns for the summer, I've been responsible for reviewing lots of code. Additionally, about five months ago BarnOwl, the console-based IM client I develop, adopted an official…
5 Jun 2010
Optimize your way to success: A guide for the web Renaissance person.
4 Jun 2010
Time really flies! Back in December 2005, Ruby on Rails 1.0 was released to the masses. I remember that was when I first got interested in Rails. Six months later, I was doing Rails development full time. Rails pushed me to contribute to the project, to write plugins, to improve my Ruby knowledge, to release gems and to become a…
30 May 2010
If you’re reading this blog, I probably don’t have to explain why I love GNU screen. I can keep a long-running session going on a server somewhere, and log in and resume my session without losing any state. I also love X-forwarding. I love being able to log into a remote server and work in a shell there, but still…
23 May 2010
Recently, I’ve been working on some BarnOwl branches that move more of the core functionality of BarnOwl into perl code, instead of C (BarnOwl is written in an unholy mix of C and perl code that call each other back and forth obsessively). Moving code into perl has many advantages, but one problem is speed – perl code is obvious…
18 May 2010
FogBugz 7.3 is a pretty huge release, despite the modest version number. It has a bunch of features that almost everyone will find useful on a daily… Read more "News"
13 May 2010
Turn off your TV and tune in to reality: your mental health will thank you.
10 May 2010
This page reacts with multiple devices. An Orientation Event will trigger a push notification publish().
I’m a long-time Kathy Sierra fan. Her talk at the Business of Software 2009 was amazing, even though, in retrospect, I realize now that she had a… Read more "Kathy Sierra’s talk at the Business of Software 2009"
9 May 2010
Since I first discovered ratpoison in 2005 or so, I've basically exclusively used tiling window managers, going through, over the years, StumpWM, Ion 3, and finally XMonad. They've all had various strengths and weaknesses, but I've never been totally happy with any of them. This blog entry is a writeup of what I want to see as a window manager.…
To celebrate last week’s release of MacRuby 0.6, O’Reilly and I started publishing the draft of my MacRuby book online: https://macruby.labs.oreilly.com/ I started thinking about working on “MacRuby: The Definitive Guide” last year when I realized that the project had a great future but there was a serious lack of documentation. With the support of the MacRuby team, I worked…
4 May 2010
“And the best answer we could come up with was, let’s make the damn thing free, and get some VC somewhere to pay for it.” Announcing the… Read more "News"
2 May 2010
Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike chemists and biologists who are trailed to obsessively document everything they do in their lab notebooks, computer scientists are taught to document the end results of their work, but aren't, in general, taught to take notes as they go, and document the steps…
30 Apr 2010
Dear TechSmith, Thank you very much for all the pictures of your pets: Also thanks for the toys, which were great. I especially like the iPhone. Yours,… Read more "Note from Taco"
19 Apr 2010
Since announcing the new plans for Stack Exchange, there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of new Q&A sites will work best on this platform.… Read more "Sites for experts"
13 Apr 2010
Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a… Read more "Stack Exchange 2.0"
11 Apr 2010
During ConFoo Canada 2010 in Montreal, Canada Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled {{ Apple’s Ruby: MacRuby }}. ##Description of the talk: For many years, Apple has been shipping its OS with Ruby. But starting about two years ago, Apple started developing their own Ruby implementation on top of Objective-C runtime for performance and compatibility reasons. A developer can already…
During ConFoo Canada 2010 in Montreal, Canada Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Rails for the non Ruby developers. ##Description of the talk: Unless you have been living on a different planet for the last few years, you have more than likely heard of Ruby on Rails. You have probably heard good and bad things about it, and might even…
4 Apr 2010
With the announcement this week that Quora had taken $11 million in VC at an $86 million valuation, there’s been an awful lot of attention on Quora. I’ve had an account there and wanted to write up some of my initial thoughts. If you haven’t heard about Quora, it’s yet another question/answer site on the web. People pose questions, and…
31 Mar 2010
There is a new book out by Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man Month)! The Design of Design
The entire extended Stack Overflow team (including the Stack Exchange team) is meeting in New York in April to do some strategic planning. For example, we need… Read more "Stack Overflow Party"
28 Mar 2010
About two months ago, Linux saw CVE-2010-0307, which was a trival denial-of-service attack that could crash essentially any 64-bit Linux machine with 32-bit compatibility enabled. LWN has an excellent writeup of the bug, which turns out to be a subtle error related to the details of the execve system call and with 32-bit compatibility mode. While dealing with this patch…
22 Mar 2010
Most ORMs support the concept of dynamic finders. A dynamic finder looks like a normal method invocation, but the method itself doesn’t exist, instead, it’s generated dynamically and processed via another method at runtime. A good example of this is Ruby. When you invoke a method that doesn’t exist, it raises a NoMethodError exception, unless […]
17 Mar 2010
A while ago Jeff and I had Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed… Read more "Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby"
15 Mar 2010
The Ruby community is a well known for at least two things: **being passionate and being **arrogant . Two characteristics that often go together but I am not going to defend or justify anything in this post, instead I will try to reflect on my own experience and will share with you my own view point. Very much like the…
14 Mar 2010
At right, a picture of Taco, a ten-week-old siberian husky puppy who moved in with us last week! Some of you may have seen my final column in… Read more "Puppy!"
13 Mar 2010
The fundamental tool of any engineering discipline is the notion of abstraction. If we can build a set of useful, easily-described behaviors out of a complex system, we can build other systems on top of those pieces, without having to understand to worry about the full complexity of the underlying system. Without this notion of abstracting away complexity, we'd be…
5 Mar 2010
TV: The brain-altering medium that demands our attention.
3 Mar 2010
After my previous post got posted to reddit, there was a bunch of interesting discussion there about some details I’d handwaved over. This is a quick followup on some the investigation that various people carried out, and the conclusions they reached. In the reddit thread, lacos/lbzip2 objected that in his experiments, he didn’t see tar closing the input pipe before…
1 Mar 2010
Sharing is caring
28 Feb 2010
"Monit: Your server's vigilant guardian and problem-solver."
27 Feb 2010
6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience, I’ve concluded that they’re often wrong. I like to say…
22 Feb 2010
At work, we have an XML API that gets quite a lot of traffic. Last week I looked into improving its performance since we are expecting more traffic soon and want to make sure our response time is optimized. My first thought was to make sure we had an optimized ActiveSupport’s xmlmini backend. Rails 2.3.5 fixed some issues when using…
21 Feb 2010
So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while. The reason is that I’ve recently started an ongoing event with a whole bunch of friends around here to encourage us to blog more. Like so many good ideas, it all started with a fundamentally simple premise. On December 21, I…
18 Feb 2010
New StackOverflow developer Kevin Montrose (6,878 reputation) added a neat feature to the career site that makes it a zillion times easier to file a CV if… Read more "Facebook / LinkedIn importers"
17 Feb 2010
Streamline your server monitoring with Munin: A practical guide.
14 Feb 2010
"MySQL replication: The easy fix and the right way to rebuild."
I’ve been looking for a good solution for versioning and synchronizing my dotfiles between machines for some time. I experimented with keeping all of ~ in subversion for a while, but it never worked out well for me. I’ve finally settled on a solution that I like using git, and so this is a writeup of my workflows for working…
A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into… Read more "Raising money for StackOverflow"
11 Feb 2010
In the early days of a technology startup, you tend to have a lot of software developers, and you feel like you could never have enough. If… Read more "Headcount"
7 Feb 2010
Bugs are fun but this time I want to talk about win. Recently I finished work on a recursive descent expression evaluator in the Bandcamp code. (That’s a mouthful and I enjoy slinging that whenever I can—it’s up there with binary space partitions.) An expression evaluator is something that can take a sequence of characters […]
5 Feb 2010
CVE-2007-4573 is two years old at this point, but it remains one of my favorite vulnerabilities. It was a local privilege-escalation vulnerability on all x86_64 kernels prior to v2.6.22.7. It’s very simple to understand with a little bit of background, and the exploit is super-simple, but it’s still more interesting than Yet Another NULL Pointer Dereference. Plus, it was the…
3 Feb 2010
To celebrate the relaunch of this site and since we are waiting for Rails 3.0 beta to be released, I figured I should share with you what I worked on the other night. I merged patches, refactored and released a new version of googlecharts, my Gem to create graphs using Google Chart API. sudo gem install googlecharts Here is a…
2 Feb 2010
It is now official: I have traded my freedom & home office for a job title, an Aeron chair in a cubicle and a 401K. I received my new employee package and, in less than a week, I will officially become a full-time employee at SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America). I’m going to work in the PlayStation department, working on…
31 Jan 2010
After going through two betas, MacRuby 0.5 final is now released and can be downloaded by clicking on the icon below: MacRuby 0.5 Don’t worry about having MacRuby and Ruby 1.8.x or 1.9 installed, MacRuby is namespaced and won’t affect your current Ruby installations, just download and launch the installer. (Note: The build was compiled for SnowLeopard only) You can…
27 Jan 2010
Debunking cold remedies: What science really says about Vitamin C and Echinacea.
26 Jan 2010
My sister got her kids a little puppy, and they’ve been trying to train it. To live with a dog in the house, you need to teach… Read more "Why testers?"