The Dehydra installation instructions got to the point where they were more confusing than helpful. I spent this morning cutting out irrelevant crud, please let me know if there are any further cleanups that need to be done.

I have been told that it should be possible to control the way the GNU linker lays out binaries. Unfortunately until recently I couldn’t figure out the right incantations to convince ld to do my bidding. Turns out what I needed was to be stranded on a beach in Fiji with nothing better to do than to reread the ld info page a few times.

Recipe:

A really good ACM article about static analysis from Coverity’s perspective has been making rounds in Mozilla. What struck me most was the following paragraph:

At the most basic level, errors found with little analysis are often better than errors found with deeper tricks. A good error is probable, a true error, easy to diagnose; best is difficult to misdiagnose. As the number of analysis steps increases, so, too, does the chance of analysis mistake, user confusion, or the perceived improbability of event sequence. No analysis equals no mistake.

My personal view has been that “dumb” analyses are the most effective ones in terms of mistakes spotted vs time wasted writing/landing the analysis. It is interesting to see that sophisticated analyses are difficult to deploy even for Coverity.