Monthly Archives: August 2005

valgrind issues in gd?

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I ran valgrind on the “fontsizetest” program that comes with gd-2.0.33 and it came up with this warning:

==83135== Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s)
==83135==    at 0x2D2E2424: gdCacheGet (gdcache.c:108)
==83135==    by 0x2D2E3175: gdft_draw_bitmap (gdft.c:863)
==83135==    by 0x2D2E3AC1: gdImageStringFTEx (gdft.c:1280)
==83135==    by 0x2D2E3256: gdImageStringFT (gdft.c:904)

I looked at the code and I don’t see anything obviously wrong, but I emailed the maintainer just in case.

In the meantime, I’ve added this to my valgrind suppressions file:

{
   /usr/local/lib/libgd.so.4/gdCacheGet
   Memcheck:Cond
   obj:/usr/local/lib/libgd.so.4
   fun:gdCacheGet
   obj:/usr/local/lib/libgd.so.4
   fun:gdImageStringFTEx
}

My opinion of the WordPress 1.5.2 debacle

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These are my thoughts after reading these two blog posts:

Stefan’s language is a bit inflammatory, but I think that he has a valid point. It’s not good development practice to silently rev something that is public without changing the version number. That’s what the version number is for – to communicate changes so that people don’t have to peek inside archives and do MD5’s and such.

In the company where I work, we have tools for uploading packages to a central repository and those tools now disallow uploading a package and overwriting an already-existing version. This is because there were too many complaints from people about the chaos that this practice caused.

Occam’s Razor would suggest to me that this was probably more likely the result of laziness than some kind of marketing conspiracy.

I would humbly suggest that the WordPress developers refrain from this practice for future issues. There is no shortage of version numbers and although it’s a little bit of hassle to bump a version number for a minor change, I think that it’s the necessary thing to do when so many people depend on this software.

By the way, I say this as someone who got his blog hacked because he was slow to apply one of the 1.5 dot release security upgrades.

Mac users: Make sure to grab the new Mac OS X security update

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From
Apple releases security update for Mac OS X:

Apple on Monday released a security update for Mac
OS X, updating several of the components and technologies in the operating system. Specifically the update affects AppKit, BlueTooth, CoreFoundation, cups, Directory Services, HIToolBox, Kerberos, loginwindow, Mail, OpenSSL, QuartzComposerScreenSaver, Security Interface, Safari, X11 and zlib.

California sunset

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California sunset

California sunset,
originally uploaded by msabramo.

A beautiful sunset taken on I-5 North, on the way back home from a nice trip to SoCal.

I flew down Thursday morning for work and Nicole drove down after dropping me off at SJC airport. There were 2 productive days of work, an insane lunch at Fogo de Chao (Brazilian churrascaria in Beverly Hills), a stay at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington, a flat tire (and 2 new front tires for Nicole’s car), and hanging out in Pasadena, Santa Monica, and Venice Beach.