April, 11, 2005 archives

there’s a very persistent trackback spammer who i have managed to complete shut down. unfortunately, my trap for this pinhead is currently set up to email the blocked trackbacks to my email. so every time he does one of his 150 trackback spam runs, i get 150 of these dumb emails.

i need to flesh out my comment/tracback spam blocking a little more so i can flag some of these to just get dropped entirely.

the best part of matthew thomas’s review of usability problems with ubuntu is the punchline.

i’ve been dealing with a mysql bug on irix and mac os x that turned up in our test suite once i fixed the kill test to actually do the test properly. after much digging in code and staring at debug traces, i noticed on irix that in the thread that is being killed, it was stuck in a blocking read that the calling code believed would be non-blocking.

by changing our setting of the non-blocking mode to use both O_NDELAY and O_NONBLOCK instead of just O_NONBLOCK, i was able to get the code to work. but i’m not sure why it is necessary.

on the bright side, this may also fix this bug about wait_timeout not working on mac os x.