Pushing rectangles...

Pushing rectangles...
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Thursday, September 26, 2002

Failure modes

One More on Biometrics. Simson Garfinkel offers a practical perspective on biometrics, at CSO Magazine.... [Freedom To Tinker]

This article mentions something I had in a previous post I tried to make: the critical failure mode of biomterics. With other forms of ID, if there is a problem with the ID itself it can be discarded and a new one issued. If the security of a biometric system is compromised there is no recovery.

7:53:11 PM    Categories: Pushing rectangles...

Free to PRE you and me

<PRE> element considered harmful. I never use the <pre> element on CavLec. No, it’s not because I’m a markup snob and consider <pre> too presentational. It’s because I don’t know how wide your screen or your browser window are.

(This is the post that prompted my new double-decoding explorations. It was lost in this afternoon's mail fun.)

The assumption here is that letting the lines break will not affect the meaning of the code, which in practice isn't even true of HTML. In a choice between protecting my layout and protecting my meaning, the layout is dispensible.

7:46:57 PM    Categories: [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "item #1".]

More double-decoding: posting from aggregator to weblog

(This is an actual reenactment of a previous post that got lost in a crash.)

I've found another double-decoding bug when posting a news item from the aggregator to the weblog. When formating the edit page, entites are getting decoded again.

The posting is handled by radio.macros.weblogPostForm, down where it says "if defined (adrGetArgs^.idstory)". radio.strings.decodeEntites is called in a bunch of places, which in turn calls our old friend xml.entityDecode with flAlphaEntites set to true. It's not clear to me at the moment where things really need to be decoded, so I'm not sure if I should make changes in radio.strings.decodeEntites or remove some of the calls to it in radio.macros.weblogPostForm. I *think* everything will have been decoded by the time it's recorded to radio.aggregator.getStoryAddress (adrGetArgs^.idstory) so that you could just get rid of all of the decodeEntites calls, but I'm not yet sure.

6:13:15 PM    Categories: Radio

Lost a post on double-decoding

I have a mail client that tends to make WinXP blue-screen every now and then (true!). On recovery, Radio seems to have eaten a post I made last night about a double-decoding bug when posting from the aggregator. I'll have to try to recreated based on what I posted to the Radio discussion forum.
6:10:24 PM    Categories: Radio