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I was submitting a file as part of my homework. The web application they bought and use paid no attention to the fact that I'm a Linux user and the local path of my homework file reads "/home/my_name/path/to/foo.tar.gz". I clicked on the "Submit" button and a javascript alert box ran up, asking me to provide a valid path.

Damn. So I Read the Fscking Source.

I searched for the string containing the alert message in the $ource and went straight to the pathname validation script. It told me that, in order to validate a string as a path, it was necessary for the string to contain the "\" (antislash) or ":\" (colon and antislash) substring at a right place (as in "C:\WinCrap\luser.exe").

Oh, they did seem to consider portability. Before the code above they tried to extract the three letters "mac" from user-agent info and do the right thing.

But the whole thing is not right.

Update: Finally got Wine + Internet Exploiter. Screw it.

See this.

I'm a student doing some number-crunchings. For a short period of time I did enjoyed Octave --- not the software, but the mailing list. I'm still in the list though I rarely use the software any more.

Yes there's maybe not too much difference from another F/OSS mailing list but it's my first experience with an opensource community. One afternoon I went into troubles and posted to the list, introducing myself and told my stories. Some twenty minutes later John W. Eaton (the main developer of Octave, also the original author of the man program --- see the output of man man) replied with the info I needed. If there's something that did `convert' me to OSS I would honor this one.

Now for my poor floating point numbers I mainly use SciPy (with the help of Pyrex and so on). Not to raise flames but I do prefer Python to Octave --- in the sense of a scripting language. I know there are flames about Python/SciPy but that have little to do with my MFLOPS. When I feel right to do it I `recede' to plain old C or Fortran.

So Congratulations and Happy Holiday for the Octave people (sorry for being late)!

Perhaps one day I'd like to pick it up. Still a great education tool, I think.