I’ve been pulling my hair out porting my positively ancient RoutePlanner program from GNOME 1 to GNOME 2 and trying to do it the “right” way—eschewing the old, working (but deprecated), humanly-comprehensible GtkCList widget for GtkTreeView [sic] and its friends. Actually, I would have stuck with GtkCList, but apparently the automated Glade conversion script decided to convert all of my widgets to use GtkTreeView. Damn annoying.

No doubt all this abstraction (separating the list into column view, overall view, iterator, storage, and selection objects) is a wonderful idea on paper, but in practice it’s a recipe for a giant headache, especially when trying to translate between the mostly-complete C API documentation and the virtually-undocumented Python API.

Kevin Aylward at Wizbang! blames Sendmail, and by extension the Open Source movement, in part for the spread of viruses on the Internet. Specifically he claims:

Here’s the kicker – Sendmail had no capability to drop messages that contain viruses.

Sorry, Kevin, but I call bullshit.

• Sendmail can scan for viruses using the “milter” (mail filter) facility, which has been present for several years. Get up to date on the technology before you start spreading crap.
• There are numerous alternative mail transport agents (MTAs) to Sendmail that also have hooks for virus scanning, including Postfix, Exim, and (if you can stand DJB-ware) qmail.
• Virus scanners can also be hooked into procmail, if you don’t actually want to futz with your MTA configuration.
• Specifically, Debian and other Linux distributions include a complete, free anti-virus scanning suite that integrates with almost any mail server (specifically, clamav and amavisd); it also includes hooks for spam trapping. I had it set up and running within an hour on the box I administer at work. It’s catching all of our Sobig.F messages, and not even spamming unrelated parties with bogus “you sent me a virus” messages like certain commercial systems I could mention.

Yes, I freely admit that sendmail is a piece of bloated, outdated shit that I won’t run on any server I administer. But blaming sendmail, when you should blame lazy admins and ISPs who can’t be bothered to avail themselves of the available free virus scanners (not to mention the ample commercial offerings), is just silly, and exactly the sort of crap you’re complaining about in the behavior of some open source advocates.

Brock has more on this theme here.

Josh Chafetz of OxBlog thinks Georgy Russell is the ideal next governor of California. It doesn’t hurt that her blog is far more interesting than Howard Dean’s. And she owns my book* (by the window)!

I think I’m in love. In a platonic way, of course…

Bitstream has generously donated a nice set of professionally-designed typefaces to the GNOME project and the larger free software community. The monospace font is particularly nice—I just changed my default PuTTY font to it.

Apple's new web browser, Safari, seems to do a pretty good job rendering websites; without comparing it side-by-side to Konqueror, the rendering seems better, although there are still some buglets in the CSS2 implementation. Notably, P:before renders differently than you'd expect; it treats it as a block-level element instead of inline, and text-transform doesn't seem to work right. However, that's better than IE6 does; it ignores them completely.

This paragraph is rendered with P:before (which I use for updates to existing entries in the blog). If you're using Opera 6 or 7, or any Gecko derivative (Mozilla, Phoenix, Chimera, K-Meleon), you'll see UPDATE: inset in the beginning of the paragraph. Internet Explorer (and the Windows HTML component it is based on) ignores it completely (I'm pretty sure Konqueror 2.2 and 3.0 does too). Safari renders it as a separate, blue paragraph like Update:.

My two complimentary copies of Running Linux, 4th ed., showed up today. Since I wrote a few pages of it (and did a technical review on the rest), I can't give an unbiased review.

I did note a few whoppers (a couple of my notes didn't make it in: most notably, bzImage isn't compressed using bzip2), and I think enscript gets discussed twice for some odd reason, but overall I think it brings Running Linux into the 21st century while retaining the spirit of Matt's original; there's something in here for all but the most seasoned Linux veteran, and it's still the first book you should buy before installing Linux, no matter what the flavor. (I remember being excited when Linux Installation and Getting Started, the predecessor of RL, came out, which will give you some idea of how long I've been a Linux afficianado.)

Incidentally, the material I wrote is in one of the two free chapters (Chapter 7; PDF pages 25–32 — real pages 196–203) available at O'Reilly's website.