I saw a lovely photo of the newly engaged couple, though I have to say that Matthew looks like he has put on a bit of weight!
Impossible pathsI'm not very impressed by the smartness or helpfulness of answers there, so I doubt that I will get adequate responses. I should just read the standards, but I am not feeling unlazy.
Are there any legal paths in POSIX that cannot be associated with a file, regular or irregular? That is, for which test -e "$LEGITIMATEPOSIXPATHNAME" cannot succeed?
Oh, ... and a Happy New Year, Advogato!
Postscript
It turns out that /dev/tty/impossible is impossible, since
POSIX says that /dev/tty must be a character device file, and
I understand that paths can only be the dirname of a file if they are directories
or symlinks. The answerer I awarded my bounty on at SU didn't figure that
out, but he gave me a clue that helped me.
I have two thoughts about eval for guile:
It does so build up one's confidence into the accuracy of the reporting, doesn't it? John McIntyre notes, in Save money: Cut back on editing, a correction in the Washington Post:
A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.So, which is your favourite Newspaper Of Record?
dmarti continues: But the fit and finish of the writing in peer media is often better than what cut-back Mainstream Media outlets can manage any more. I suppose that's good news..
Quite. When you compromise quality to save money, you save the most visible cuts, like checking whether words mean what you think, 'til last.
Simply marvellous! He got what can make not just tens, but hundreds online!
I would love to read his FREE eBook, but unfortunately I apparently would need to give Ian my email address, and I'm sure that must be against my principles.
It seems to me that the right response to this situation is to put less energy into solving bugs, and more energy into documenting the projects so that other FS types can understand the code. I think that a fair proportion of people who take bur reporting seriously are people who want to understand how the code works, and a fair proportion of people who have some grasp of how the code works will be willing to tackle items on a list of important bugs and issues. Get the interest to work for you, and not against you.
A feature that might help assuage worries about sleeper-spammer accounts would be to have the advogato.org/person/ list be ordered from most-recently modified account to least-recently. It then becomes much easier to write scripts to look for recently updated Observer accounts.
Currently the order of the people list is loosely based on certjuice. If we disallowed "/person/index.html" on robots.txt, then modifying an account wouldn't, in itself, attract search engine attention to a user page. Is there any interest in the current ordering? Would there be any other risks associated with the new ordering?
Now that there are stable links in your diary page to those accounts, the spammers can come back any time and re-establish them, and get good Google tracking without the "nofollow" annotations found in the "new members" list. I have noticed that spammer accounts with no text attached often slip off the bottom of the "new members" list undeleted. There would be no searchable Google-preferred reference to those accounts without your links. Probably you should so annotate your own links.I see no continuing value in these links now the accounts are deleted, so I have changed the anchors to bolds. I do think anchors mean the accounts are deleted rather quicker than they would otherwise be, and unfortunately you can't give Advogato links nofollow annotations: StevenRainwater's html munger drops rel tags in anchors.
I'm still not concerned about "stealth" accounts that neither certify, nor are certified, do not post diary entries, nor are linked to on the new members list. Why should anyone care what text they have, or what nofollow links they make? Note that recreated accounts do appear on the new members list, so receive no less scrutiny than accounts with fresh names. Cf. e.g., new account rosecole, Spam Rating=12.
In the unlikely case that some use is found for these junk accounts, it should not be too difficult to run a filter on the Advogato account database and Apache logfiles to dredge them up. Or bloat the robots.txt file with a list of Observer account pages...
FWIW, compare the results for the following two searches:
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
