pterjan's diary

  FTP sucks

Don't worry I won't tell you stories about passive mode, firewalling issues... I will only show a very simple issue that make me think FTP design really sucks.

touch "b -> c"; touch c; ln -s "b -> c" a; ln -s c "a -> b"

We now have a symlink named a pointing to the file b -> c and one named a -> b pointing to the file c.

Now imagine this directory is accessible via FTP.

ftp> ls
200 PORT command successful
150 Connecting to port 50712
drwxrwxr-x    2 501      501          4096 Oct  3 10:16 .
drwxrwxr-x    4 501      501          4096 Oct  3 00:26 ..
lrwxrwxrwx    1 501      501             6 Oct  3 10:16 a -> b -> c
lrwxrwxrwx    1 501      501             1 Oct  3 10:16 a -> b -> c
-rw-rw-r--    1 501      501             0 Oct  3 10:16 b -> c
-rw-rw-r--    1 501      501             0 Oct  3 10:16 c
226-Options: -a -l 
226 6 matches total

There is no way to know if the symlink name is a or a -> b. Most clients will parse both as being a pointing to b -> c.

Update : actually I can think of one : using file size to get the length of the string but I think this is OS and maybe FS dependant...

  Firefox Trademark

A lot of people is getting angry about the issues between Debian and the Mozilla foundation, and a GNU project forking Firefox. Some Mozilla people really did not like some poster in front of there booth (French), etc. People have "great" discussions everywhere , most of the time full of insults.

There are however some nice blogs to read, like Lucas' one which has some nice links and present both points of view, and Glandium's technical answer.

My opinion on this topic is quite simple : If people from Mozilla want only unmodified builds to use the Firefox name and the official icons, why don't they set different defaults in the distributed sources, with a different set of icon ? They would only use what is restricted in their own builds, and maybe distribute it in a separate small tarball for people wanting to do official builds in other environments. That would also fix the issue of the icons not being Free.

  Duke Nukem Forever is not out...

But Frozen Bubble 2.0.0 with networking support is !

After months of development and months of hard testing it is finally there ! Be prepared for a loss of productivity and some disturbance in the whole Internet.

Will this be more efficient than Dunc Bank to postpone Etch ?