We recently upgraded our Samba servers from an old version of Ubuntu andSamba to a new version of both. When we did this, we found that WindowsXP machines running Office 2003 stopped being able to save documentsin Office 2003 formats. Attempted saves would fail with a more or lessgeneric error, and opening documents would stall for a while and thenopen them read only.

(Yes, it really is this specific. For example, Office 2003 can savethe same

Unix has generally had decent APIs, but every so often Unix people havebeen a bit too concerned with minimalism and storing data as efficientlyas possible. Several times this has invited in string-related APIs thatpractically beg for code to make mistakes, because of how they specifystring termination.

Here is an abstracted example. Consider an API where you use thefollowing structure:

struct dirent {    uint16_t  ino;    char      name[14];}

You will notice that there is nothing explicit to tell

I watched Oh! Edo Rocket several years ago (before I started writing Roving Thoughts )and enjoyed it quite a lot; ever since then I've felt that it was anunderappreciated gem, and I am glad to see people like Author discoverit .

(Yes, yes, technically Author 'discovered' it ages ago, back when itoriginally aired, and merely watched it recently. You all know what Imean. Ironically I think one of Author's old side comments about a bitin the first