Virus bounces

Sorry you've joined the esteemed ranks of the virus bounce recipients, garym. I've been on it for a while, mostly as an admin of the ghostscript.com lists, since we have TMDA filtering of the xiph.org lists. However, in this outbreak I've been getting lots to my xiph.org address; apparently it trolls the web cache, which explains that, and why everyone's suddenly asking us to purge the addresses from the archives.

Inappropriate spam bounces actually account for more than half of the messages caught by the list filters. Of course it's terrible; I expect the problem is there's no integration between the site's MTA and the virus filter's they've bought, so the filter has no way to obtain the envelope sender or otherwise guess whether the from is spooffed.

Of course, replying at all in the case of the virulent Sobig strains, which are known to spoof, is inexcusable laziness. I find a ray of hope two weeks ago when I complained to a particularly personally worded bounce and the admin actually said they would clean up the problem. Hooray!

I don't know though. It's really starting to look like we need a replacement to mailing lists. Usenet news was better, but we moved to lists because of spam. Now it's time to move again, but I don't know what to.

C macros (sometimes) harmful

chalst responded to raph's complaint about macros and error reporting protesting that C macros (unlike M4 in the context of autotools) work fine. That is generally true, and they're quite a powerful feature; C would be 2/3 the language it is without them. The contraints are mostly idiomatic however. Another example of poor error reporting and debuging performance raph had in mind was in fact Ghostscript, which is written in C. It also implements memory structure tracing for garbage collection and an object system (among other things) with preprocessor macros. It's not unusual for these macros to be 5 layers deep, with definitions spanning several files, qualitatively similar to the complexity you see with the autotools. It's definitely a demonstration of the power of the macro system, but it can be no fun at all to debug the code. I suppose it's a combination of the unfamiliar idiom and the lack of debugger support, but there's probably a reason the preprocessor in C is usually limited to constant substitution, trival inline functions, conditional compilation. and some definitional magic within header files.

Travel

I'm in California for a few weeks. Came to San Francisco to get the required physical for my Canadian Immigration Visa. S came with me this time so we've been having some vacation. In addition to the usual visiting with friends we went to Yosemite for 4 days. S followed up with a week long backpacking trip while I stayed in the Bay Area working and visiting with raph, and now we're renting a car for a week and travelling along the central coast. Looking forward to more perfectly wonderful weather. :)