Category: English

Coverity scans of OpenPAM

The following is a copy of a letter I sent to Coverity today.

I am the author and maintainer of OpenPAM, which was recently promoted to Rung 2 in Coverity’s Open Source scan.

OpenPAM was included in your scans in April 2006, at my request, after a NetBSD developer had contacted me and suggested that the NetBSD scans had revealed numerous bugs in OpenPAM. I later learned that this was in fact not true. On the other hand, NetBSD’s CVS history for OpenPAM shows a number changes prompted by lint(1) warnings, most of which were (from my recollection) either false positives or a result of NetBSD’s own modifications.

However, I was not aware that Coverity was still tracking OpenPAM, as the last time I tried to log in using the URL, user name and password I had been provided, the site seemed to have been taken down. Besides, OpenPAM has been dormant for a couple of years, until the release of OpenPAM Hydrangea last December.

While it is flattering to see my project mentioned in the computer press as a “major Open Source project” and—effectively—one of the eleven least buggy, it would have been nice to have been notified directly by Coverity instead of finding out from a press release.

That being said, I am immensely grateful for the service Coverity provides to the Open Source community in general, and to FreeBSD and OpenPAM in particular.

Regards,

Vaccines cause autism and… what, exactly?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this whole MMR / autism brouhaha lately, partly because it recently spilled over onto /.. It’s not hard to understand why some people might think MMR causes autism, since almost all cases of autism develop within a few months or years of the MMR shot. Isn’t the connection obvious?

It got me wondering about what other afflictions might be caused by those pesky vaccines. Then it suddenly struck me—I’m a victim myself!

When I was around ten or eleven, I had a diph-tet shot which hurt like hell and made my arm swell up for a couple of weeks. Not too long afterwards, maybe a matter of months, I started noticing other symptoms. I started getting hair where I hadn’t had any before, and some lumps I had always had between my legs but never given much attention started to grow; I started having intermittent pains in the larger joints and in my chest muscles; social interaction became awkward and strained; my speech became distorted. There is absolutely no doubt—this all started after my diph-tet shot.

I think I’ll call The Observer right away. The public has a right to know!

Thank you, fuwwy pawwot

 

[edit 2013-02-13: this post originally had a lolcat based on this photo with the text “Fuwwy Pawwot sez happy bday daddy”; the shirt I am wearing was a birthday present and references the lolrus. That image is long lost, but luckily, I still had the original photograph. My “fuwwy pawwot” died of kidney failure on August 16, 2008. I still miss her.]