I've looked up to
graydon since I was a teenager, and so it was super neat to discover he was on LiveJournal.His recent post on languages is worth reading.
Another talk I saw today (other than the EFF one) was a guy who'd written a static analysis tool for binaries. I think the idea was interesting -- he found bugs in all sorts of Windows DLLs, including the Blaster exploit, without any of the source -- but the fellow was far too full of himself and his analyses seemed ad-hoc. There was one slide where he talked about how to go about analyzing the code, and he actually had a bullet that said "graph theory", about which he actually said something like "some research ideas, and they put loops into a graph, but whatever" and then described his solution: stare at a bunch of generated code from a buggy (buffer-overflowing) loop until he discovered a pattern.
I don't understand how you can go to Google of all places, a place notorious for hiring from academia and with some very smart language people, and say things like that. But I guess his tools worked, or something.
I'm gonna put FreeBSD on my computer. The RAID screwup has cascaded into corruption on my new copy of the raid and somehow also in my home directory (which is in a partition unrelated to the rest of this) and so I think I'm gonna have to reinstall an OS anyway, and I figure I can't claim to be
jeffr's friend without putting a bit more time into his work.