OACR almost whacked
News ·Tuesday February 6, 2007 @ 23:47 EST (link)
I've mentioned OACR1 before; we're still working on Office 11 sp3 (Office 2003 service pack 3 to the folks at home); OACR analyzes source code and points out vulnerabilities (or possible vulnerabilities), such as buffer overflows, and we fix the problem if there is one (usually not, but catching even one exploitable overrun makes much of the hassle worthwhile), or suppress the warning with a comment (OACR frequently isn't intelligent enough to understand how buffers are being managed), or add an annotation or OACR_ASSUME to help OACR understand. It's a massive pain in the behind; such things are the reason God invented interns, but we don't have any right now so we're all pitching in until the muck is raked and we can leave Office 11 alone forevermore (only to get into Office 12sp1, which won't be as bad). In these cases, it would be great to leave the past in the past; we make all these improvements to the product, including to the architecture and the source code, and then we have to abandon them (or copy them all over). Arggh! (For instance, Word 2003 isn't even in C++; it's straight C, the C++ port was done early in 12.)
There are quite a few people in the world that aren't aware that Washington Initiative 957 is just a ploy by gays and sympathizers in their continuing quest to validate and legalize gay marriage. In a nutshell, the Initiative proposes that marriages that don't produce children within three years be annulled; they're aiming at those that oppose gay marriage because it can't result in procreation. It's silly because that's a stupid reason to oppose gay marriage, but they're hoping that people will see the initiative, oppose it, and "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as someone on ChatMS so elegantly put it. One might hope that people aren't that stupid. Haha.
[1] Generally pronounced "whacker" (which makes the headline make more sense), but at least one person pronounces it "ochre".
