21 Mar 2001 (updated 27 Mar 2001) »
der diary
Please forgive me, for I have sinned. I haven’t posted for more nearly two weeks.
netbsd
Working on bugs. I’m sick of my Alpha not being as good as my dual PPro running NetBSD, so I’m installing -current and the latest Xfree86 cvs in an effort to bring it into line with my x86 unix.
Had fun trying to build -current as a non-privileged user. Apparently there is some work there to make that happen. It’s unacceptable to have to compile the lot as root.
Whilst make build was chugging away, I dug through my software testing sites, and re-found fuzz. I ported it into the 21st century (ansi C, strict compilation flags), and sure enough, it ran fine… which meant that a whole bunch of utilities crashed and hung.
In 1990, the guys who wrote fuzz found that about 25% of all utilities from commercial Unix vendors have basic input validation and memory allocation issues. In 2001, NetBSD still has about the same level of issues. Argl. Doesn’t anyone run regression tests around here?
beta 2: let microsoft spend enough time on something, they will get it right
Got beta 2 yesterday @ 110 kB/s. Not a bad rate, but much less than 650 kB/s I get when downloading stuff from mirror.aarnet.
beta 2 rocks. They fixed all my outstanding issues, and introduced a few. My CNET Pro 200 cheapass PCI ethernet card installed out of the box for the first time. The install was flawless and it was fast. WEP is back!
Dan and I played around with trying to control each other’s PC, and that worked very well. It seems that TermSrv is built into anything > Pro now. Excellent.
Problems still outstanding: Guest is on by default (!) Administrator level accounts are created by default on Pro without passwords (!) It’s nearly impossible to figure out how to log on as the local Administrator using the new funky login screen. You can’t easily script a number of the new features (ICF/ICS).
And then there were the usual set of compatibility bugs with programs that only I seem to use. Time to start bugging. 🙂
But overall, WinXP beta 2 is excellent. It’s just been promoted to my primary operating system.
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