I am in need of a C parser which I can use to detect violations of a coding standard. Particularly it must be able to be sensitive to comments (the internals of which are important also) and whitespace, over and above the usual need to be sensible about the rest of the language.

In order to be ideal, it should not need the C to be preprocessed first. I am not after a syntax checker, after all – the compiler does that for me. I want to be able to detect things like struct{ where struct { is what we mandate in our coding style. However I also want to detect more complex things such as static functions which lack documentation comments, or functions which are not declared as returntypenewlinefunctionname(arglist)newline{.

I hope someone has a cunning idea…

D.

My cat appears to like cola and also twiglets. Did I get a defective model?

If you happen to have my landline number (starts 0161) then it’s important to know that it has changed.

In order to know the new one, either ask me by email, ring me on my mobile phone, or follow these instructions to mutate the old number:

1. Split the STD off the front.
2. Split the number into a three digit section and a four digit section.
3. Subtract 27 from the three digit section.
4. Subtract 8000 from the second section.
5. Add 724 to the second section.
6. Reassemble the phone number.
7. To verify your result, the digits of the phone number, including STD, should add up to 29.

Ingo Juergensmann recently asked if there is a way to get more entropy for exim4 for a way to make exim4 take less entropy.

A while ago I posted my solution which grabbed the imagination of Steve Gran who I believe created and upload a debian package which garnered a not inconsiderable amount of back-flack from people who failed to realise that I wrote it because I wanted something which would solve my problem, and that perhaps the package needed more disclaimers or warnings.

One person actually took time to explain things to me and provide sample code which one day I will incorporate into the release copy of randomsound but for now it’s just crap :-)

So Ingo, one option is to install the randomsound package and enjoy that, you might have to backport it to stable if that’s what your server runs.

Another would be to spank the fool who wants to send huge mails through your server and tell them to get a web space :-)