I originally had a category for software in this blog because I wanted to rant and rave about little-known software that I use, and I seem to have forgotten about that lately.

So this post here is dedicated to TrueCrypt. Truecrypt is a Windows program lets you encrypt drives on your PC so they can only be accessed after entering a keyphrase, very much like PGPdrive, only better and free.

Why do I need something like this? To tell the truth, not everything on my work PC is work-related, there’s quite a bit of private information on my PC. Why should that priate stuff be readable for anybody who can get my computer? I’ve taken over computers from previous employees myself, and found their personal data still on the hard drive.

TrueCrypt has two different ways of drive encryption. You can either create a virtual drive inside a large file in the regular filesystem and mount it, or encrypt an entire partition (which is what I do). It offers a wide range of encryption methods, and even lets you create hidden volumes which provide you with plausible deniability.

Final Rating: 6 points.

Using TrueCrypt drives is very smooth. They are a little slower than regular hard disk access, but I’m not storing swap files there, so it doesn’t really matter at all. The only thing I would like is remounting of drives after login, and a way to keep shared folders on the drive shared from one session to the next. Right now, when Windows boots, it finds that the drive no longer exists and removes the share.

I’ve added gravatar support to the comments section, so if you have a registered avatar at that site and use the same email in the comments section, your image will show up. Of course, my own avatar is still in the review process, so I can’t see it. I’m also playing with Technorati and del.iciou.us, but I find myself wishing for more support from w.bloggar.

You can tell that I haven’t got a lot to do this weekend. I was working on implementing an old tabletop strategy game earlier today, and figured out the boost serialization library for that. Very nice. Now I need to write out XML reports, which is tedious work, and nothing new. So I’m taking a little time off from that.

I’ve just spent two days cleaning up Pia’s computer from all the spyware and viruses she collected. It was quite a job. My slightly dated version of Ad-Aware found over 600 dialers, spyware toolbars and other malware. Spybot S&D found another 500 after I updated it to the current definitions file. Then I installed Kaspersky Antivirus, which took out 36 viruses. I usually don’t like Kaspersky, but it did a good job here.

All this happened to her PC while Norton Antivirus was running. I know an antivirus software that I will never recommend again. Instead, I recommend installing Spybot S&D on all new computers, and making sure it gets run frequently. I’m not sure it’s possible to educate some people. The average internet user doesn’t have what I would consider the minimum requirements to be on the net, but it seems there’s no way to stop them, either.

I’ve been going through a lot of the 3 million lines of Anarchy Online code the past months, and seen several bits that make me, as a programmer, laugh. These are completely unfunny for non-programmers, of course. And they aren’t representative for most of the AO code, because that runs pretty well these days.

Here’s a good one, from the just-in-case department:

return this?m_nValue:0;

Found the same one in the Miranda MSN plugin. Note the informative comment.

  if ( this == NULL )  // :)
    return 0;

Then there’s the gratuituos memory leak (props to André who showed me this one today):

void foo(const char * s, int v, std::map& amap) {
  char * p = strcpy(malloc(sizeof(s)+1), s);
  amap[p] = x;
}

Here’s a redundancy that I wasn’t certain about, but I checked the standard, delete NULL is allowed:

if (p) delete p;

My favourite though:

void foo(int i) {
  char b[11];
  sprintf(b, "%d", i);
 ...
}

This bombed. Signed integers require 12 chars to represent, including the trailing space. But that’s not the funny part. The funny part is that I checked who did it, and it turns out the previous person that touched the code must have found a similar error. The diff he comitted was this:

- char b[10];
+ char b[11];

How long should we wait?

WaitForSingleObject( MyThread_c::GetInstance()->m_hThread, INFINITE ); // wait max 2 seconds

Like I said, none of this is funny if you’re not a programmer. And I probably forgot some of the better ones. So, have you got any code stories of your own?

The URL of my blog has been dependent on the machine it was on for a long time, because I was afraid of change. But I figured there simply aren’t that many people reading it anyway, so who cares if the location changes. The new URL is http://enno.homeunix.net/.

Technically, homeunix.net is one of the domains available for users of dyndns.org. You can have a subdomain for free, and they take care of the DNS magic for you. All you have to do is tell them what IP your server is using. It doesn’t matter that it already has another name. It can even change its IP frequently. Mine doesn’t, but at some point, I might move the whole site, and all I need to do then is update the IP at dyndns.org.

The apache server on eressea.upb.de that hosts my web pages was told to react differntly to requests for enno.homeunix.net, via Virtual Hosts. This has become a breeze to configure with the Apache2 in Debian. All I had to do was create a new file in /etc/apache2/sites-available, insert a few lines, and link it from /etc/apache2/sites-enabled.

Finally, I also made a quick mod_rewrite rule so requests to old urls stay valid but get sent to the new address. And while I’m aware none of this is magic, I’ve just never done it before and I’m surprised how easy it was.

Young people occasionally ask me whether language X is something they’ll need to make computer games, or what they should learn if they want to become programmers. And what language should we teach in school?

I learned UCSD Pascal in school. When I came to university, freshmen were taught C++, and by the time I was in a teaching position myself, the language of choice at almost all universities had changed to Java, so that’s what I taught.

Last year opened my eyes a bit, though. I was interviewing prospective new employees, and several people fresh from school. A lot of candidates were weeded out because they admitted to knowing only Java – and despite numerous claims that this would happen, we still don’t make games in Java, and neither does 97% of the rest of our industry. C++ is the language.

While that was expected, the next group of people we weeded out were the ones that said they knew C++, because they’d taken it for extra credits in school, but still wrote most of their own stuff in Java. Some of them managed to get through to the interview, and failed our C++ test. And that’s where I realized, C++ is so significantly different from Java that it might be a really bad thing for us to teach students Java in school. It’s easier to be a good C++ programmer and then learn Java – beacuse in terms of things you can fuck up, C++ is the bigger problem, but if you master it, Java comes quite easy.

Schools like Java because they can skip over the whole issue of pointers, memory, headers, makefiles, templates and the general nastiness that comes with it. But frankly, if you never hear about memory allocation, pointers and makefiles, it’ll come as a huge surprise to you, which you then treat in one of two ways: you avoid it, and go back to Java, or you try to ignore it, and end uop with really, really bad C++.

Personally, I’d teach people some C first. The pure stuff. I can avoid talking about objects in lesson one (because printf is quicker to explain then std::cout and it’s crazy syntax). Something happens really fast in your program. Memory allocation, headers an Makefiles will appear just like they do in real life. And then, when that’s understood, I’d introduce C++, and when I then explain about templates, containers and classes there will be a collective sigh of relief, just like we sighed it when C++ first appeared. But the students will know that underneath, memory allocation still happens, linked lists are still linked by pointers, templates mean big, big headers, and Makefiles are a bloody pain.

Two things that Java doesn’t do well: Staged delivery of the concepts (instead you get them all at once just for a Hello World) and an understanding of the inner machinations.

Yes, it was time to change the look of the blog. I was getting tired of the bloghaus skin.

Since I am no web designer, and have better things to do than creating skins, I looked for free ready-made nucleus skins. There aren’t many. There are even fewer good ones. This one is one of the best (which means you’ve probably seen it in lots of other places, too). I want to customize it more, I just added the ‘Recent Entries’ list on the left, but I’m not happy with the grey colors, so they’ll have to go next.

I also need to find a way to tell the Smart Breaks plugin not to mess up my source code. This blog will always contain code that’s meant to be formatted, and I’ve got to have a way to make it not mess with <pre>. Another day.