Peter’s blog

Crash and burn

That is just what xemacs 21.4.17 does when running on Mac OS X Tiger under X11. It simply crashes during initialisation. If you unset the DISPLAY environment variable so that the ncurses version comes up, it works fine. I tried the beta version of xemacs, version 21.5.20 and it also works fine.

After a quick run with gdb it seems the culprit is the call to NSCreateObjectFileImageFromFile(fname, &file); In previous versions of Mac OS X passing a NULL pointer for filename used to cause NSCreateObjectFileImageFromFile to return a dll handle to the current process image but in Tiger is just crashes with:

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 dyld 0x8fe1e900 strncmp + 224
1 dyld 0x8fe04f68 dyld::loadPhase3(char const*, dyld::LoadContext const&, std::vector<char const*, std::allocator<char const*> >*) + 56
2 dyld 0x8fe05638 dyld::loadPhase0(char const*, dyld::LoadContext const&, std::vector<char const*, std::allocator<char const*> >*) + 468

It seems that some Darwin developer somewhere broke the dyld::loadPhase3() routine during their latest programming efforts.

A quick and dirty workaround is to edit the file src/device-x.c, line 505 and change

dll_handle xaw_dll_handle = dll_open (NULL);

to

dll_handle xaw_dll_handle = dll_open (”/usr/local/bin/xemacs”);

If your xemacs is not installed in /usr/local/bin then just change the above string to point to the location its installed in.

Hopefully some xemacs development guys read this and fix it properly by propagating argv[0] to x_init_device()

Technorati Tags: macosx, tiger, xemacs

In order to provide the up/down arrow command history, the mysql program stores anything you type in the file .mysql_history in your home directory. For most commands this is ok but what about grant statements?

If you regularly use grant or update statements to add or modify users and passwords, then anyone with read access to the file .mysql_history can see the usernames and passwords required to gain access to your database.

To avoid such security traps just use your favourite text editor and delete the offending lines from the file ~/.mysql_history. Do this each time you issue a grant or update statement containing a password and your site will be much more secure.

Technorati Tags: mysql, security

It just upgraded all my home macs to Mac OS X 10.3.9 which also includes a new version of Safari 1.3. It seems that the first time you run the newly installed Safari some standard bookmarks are created on your bookmark bar. These include bookmarks to news, .mac, apple.com, yahoo.com and a few others.

This is bad form by Apple. These standard bookmarks should only be created for a new installation and not for an existing one.

Technorati Tags: macosx, safari