Internet Alchemy

I stumbled across this little tip in the MS Knowledge Base today:

…the following line of VBScript forces an immediate garbage collection:



Y = len(string(65537, ‘x’))



This script line fills up a temporary string larger than 128K, which causes garbage collection to start. The temporary string is not stored; if it were, the string contents would not be freed until the aforementioned conditions are met and the next garbage collection is performed.

The WebClient API specification has been released on the Mozilla site. From the introduction:

The webclient project aims to provide a browser neutral Java API that enables generic web browsing capability. This capability includes, but is not limited to: web content rendering, navigation, a history mechanism, and progress notification. The actual capabilities implemented depend on the underlying browser implementation. Webclient does not deal with web authoring.

Something like this can’t come too soon with the number of Java web browser projects out there. It should be worth submitting it to Sun’s JCP as well.

Slashdot has turned up the news that Sun is dropping it’s two Java development environments: Java Workshop and Java Studio. This is a shame since I really liked the concept of Java Workshop way back when Java had just been released. Sun never really positioned it right though and no matter what anyone says Java is too slow to run a decent text editing application. The original PCWeek story is here

More rumours on Microsoft’s COOL project, this time courtesy of jTechUpdate (this page uses ActiveX).
Tod Nielson, of Microsoft USA is quoted as dismissing the rumours as urban legends. He also
added that they were not planning any major releases of their development tools
this year. My bet is that COOL will emerge as part of the next incarnation
of Visual C++, probably 2-3 months after the release of Windows 2000. It’s likely to
come with it’s own virtual machine and will be touted as the ideal
COM+ development environment.
Of course the guy who really knows about this is Steven Lucco, formerly of Omniware, now at Microsoft. Check
out some of the papers he’s coauthored: Efficient and language-independent mobile programs,
Efficient software-based fault isolation,
Design and Efficient Implementation of Virtual Machines. Click on the COOL keyword above to see some
earlier research into it’s origins.

You may have noticed that we’ve reopened the comments section for each item. It’s
a simpler system than before and it directly links into the archive for each item so it’s all in one place now. Sorry, but I couldn’t bring over all the old comments.

Well I’m back from holiday so updates should resume from today. I was away from any kind of computer for 10 days so had lots of time to do some real thinking. Anyway I came back to two dead servers. The NT server had blue screened and now refuses to even boot, could be the memory or something on the motherboard. Pity, since it had been up for close on 4 months without a reboot.

Via the NT Bugtraq list comes these two excellent articles about discovering and exploiting buffer overflows in NT. The first, by dark spyrit, shows how he located an overflow inf SLMail and demonstrates how to use that to start an interactive console session listening on any port. He also provides an excellent tutorial on patching overflows in binary files if you can’t wait for the official vendor patch.

The second is The Tao of Windows Buffer Overflow by DilDog and is a tutorial of the fundamentals of understanding how buffer overflows occur and why you should be concerned.

The Register is reporting that Microsoft are close to releasing their supposed Java killer – Cool. Rumours hint that it will ship with conversion tools to convert existing Java applications to the Cool environment which is an enhanced version of C++.

The pace of development on the Mozilla project is accelerating. Three new
areas of functionality have been added to the Mozilla CVS tree
in the past week, all by external developers.

First there’s the new XSL Transformations code, ported from the XSL:P Java based processor. This
is a significant step towards being able to get full client side styling
of XML documents. [MozillaZine Discussion]

Once upon a time I used to run a site that hosted a long list
of publicly available news servers. I closed that site down a few months
ago because the work involved in maintaining it was too great. Well,
I’m pleased to say that it’s back and better than before. It now checks the servers
on a regular schedule so they’re guaranteed to work. So if your ISP doesn’t carry
the mozilla newsgroups or alt groups try one of the servers
at usenet.startshere.net, which is the
first part of the Usenet area of StartsHere.