Giovanni Dall’olio has recently posted a presentation on using make.

Although it has “bioinformatics” on the title page, this is a good and very easy to understand make intro.

Original post is here.

We are pleased to announce the release of GNAT GPL 2009, the Ada Toolset for Academic users and FLOSS developers. It introduces many new features including:

- Ability to generate byte code for the JVM

- Improved support for the .NET Framework

- Addition of the Ada-Java Interfacing Suite (AJIS) that enables native Ada code to be called from Java:
http://www.adacore.com/2008/06/17/ada-java_interfacing_suite

- Availability on the Mac OS X (64 bit) platform

- Automatic C/C++ binding generators

- Addition of the GNAT Component Collection (GNATcoll) providing new APIs that can be extended by the user community:
http://www.adacore.com/2008/06/17/gnat_component_collection

GNAT GPL 2009 comes with version 4.3.1 of the GNAT Programming Studio IDE and GNATbench 2.3, the GNAT plug-in for Eclipse.

It is available for the GNU Linux, Mac OS X (64 bit), .NET, JVM and Windows platforms.

GNAT GPL 2009 can be downloaded from the “Download” section on the new Libre website:
https://libre.adacore.com.

I wonder if the new JVM bytecode generation feature was frequently requested by Ada developers, or is just a move towards popularizing Ada as a highly capable programming language. Either way, it’s good.

Hopefully, I will find time and a matching project to finally learn Ada properly – since a couple of years I believe Ada is a very good programming language. And the D language is better than C and C++ (holy war, anyone? )

Since some WP release, the comment author’s link in comments is broken – it has ‘ external nofollow’ attached straight to the href attribute (which breaks the link).

I assume that the problem is caused by Google Analytics, namely the “track outgoing clicks” feature (as recalled, might be inaccurate feature name). “Track outgoing links” adds some JavaScript code to all outgoing links, and that script has tick characters like this one ‘ which, incidentally, are also used for delimiting the values of comment anchor tags.

To fix:
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Once I accidentally added circa 300 MiB of archive files to one of my git repositories (which was as small as 5 MiB). I removed those files as soon as I noticed them, but the .git directory still preserved commits with those files, and still occupied over 300 MiB.

I have found the solution at stackoverflow (see also this question).

This method worked for me, but I couldn’t push my rebased repository to the gitosis. I would need to re-init the gitosis repository from my rebased, but I’m not yet prepared to do that.

There is also a slightly different method (which relies on a temporary tag instead of a temporary branch), documented in Git online manual pages; I prefer the temporary branch method.

Below is a full copy-paste of the winning answer by Charles Bailey:

# create and check out a temporary branch at the location of the bad merge
git checkout -b tmpfix

# remove the incorrectly added file
git rm somefile.orig

# commit the amended merge
git commit –amend

# go back to the master branch
git checkout master

# replant the master branch onto the corrected merge
git rebase tmpfix

# delete the temporary branch
git branch -d tmpfix

Also, in my case this thread at stackoverflow was highly useful. I start enjoying the concise and compact style of Charles Bailey :
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Yesterday I had a look at mod.email.php – the Email module of ExpressionEngine CMS.

It appears that it is very easy to use ExpressionEngine’s contact form (which uses Email module) to send emails to arbitrary addresses – simply put, send spam using someone’s EE.

And here’s why:

• recipients hidden field is passed to the client; it is encrypted, but with access to the mod.email.php code, it is a matter of several minutes to write your own email-encoding function which will produce a completely valid recipients field
• there’s also XID field, which seems to be unique for each page load

Spamming algorithm is clear, so I won’t elaborate. (I could have missed some session variables, though – didn’t check them.)

This information is valid as of ExpressionEngine 1.6.6, but nothing in the change-logs indicates that this mechanism was modified in the newer versions of EE.

Update: I’ve tested, and this vulnerability does exist. The simplest prevention measure is to enable Captcha for Contact Form.

I’ve notified the developers.

Joel Spolsky has an interesting (and useful) post on evidence-based scheduling, as he calls that approach. The post discusses an approach to estimate project volume and key dates (such as milestones and release) based on prior performance of each of the project developers. As Joel argues, this approach provides several benefits, and – among others – allows releasing the software product on the date planned.

I would recommend learning more about “evidence-based scheduling” to anybody who is somehow involved into software development.

Also, for me personally it was useful to read the preceding article by Joel (called painless software schedules), which summarizes some basic ideas you should keep in mind while trying to develop some piece of software (mostly from the manager’s viewpoint). If you are going to read that “obsolete” article – better do so before reading evidence-based scheduling.

We are pleased to announce the release of GNAT GPL 2008, the Ada Toolset for Academic users and FLOSS developers.

It introduces hundreds of enhancements including:

• Availability on the Windows .NET platform
• Upgrade of the debugging engine
• Improvement in robustness and efficiency for Ada 2005 features
• Many new warnings & restrictions to help programmers detect errors earlier
• Companion tools such as gprof, gcov, gnatcheck, gnatpp and gnatmetric are being enhanced to support a wider variety of needs, coding styles, and coding standards
• Support for Pre/Post conditions

GNAT GPL 2008 comes with version 4.2.1 of the GNAT Programming Studio IDE and GNATbench 2.1, the GNAT plug-in for Eclipse.

It is available on the GNU Linux (32 and 64 bit), .NET, and Windows platforms.

GNAT GPL 2008 can be downloaded from the “Download GNAT GPL Edition” section on https://libre.adacore.com/