I have updated the Win64 port of Vim. It now includes a working installer, a working "Edit with Vim" shell extension, and the first 195 patches for Vim 7.0. Get it while it’s hot!

Dark Fire is set in the summer of 1540, a few years after Henry VIII es­tab­lished himself as the head of the Church of England. Matthew Shardlake is a London lawyer, who takes on a case defending a young woman against the charge of murdering her 12-year-old cousin. She refuses to speak and will be "pressed" by heavy weights until she enters a plea—or dies. In exchange for a temporary reprieve, Shardlake agrees to take on an in­ves­ti­ga­tion for his sometime patron, Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s first minister. An alchemist claims to have discovered the …continue.

This book is blurbed by Dan Brown on the front cover; happily, The Dante Club is a much better book than The Da Vinci Code and Pearl is a much better writer than Brown.

The poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, their publisher, J.T. Fields, and the historian George Washington Greene are completing the first trans­la­tion of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy ever to be published in America. It is Boston in 1865, just after the Civil War. Two prominent Brahmins are murdered in …continue.

I have been cleaning up some issues with the Win64 port of Vim, including the Edit with Vim shell extension not working very well. When I built the shell extension with VS 2005 on x86, I would get the following whenever I right-clicked in Explorer:

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library

Runtime Error!

Program: C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE

R6034

An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.

There was no mention of which ap­pli­ca­tion was at fault, though it was obvious in this case. I have also seen some mention of verclsid in the error dialog, though not when I took this snapshot.

The underlying problem …continue.

I’m slightly more hopeful this week about not Attacking Iran after reading this piece, subtitled Thelma and Louise Im­pe­ri­al­ism.

You only have to pick up the morning paper to find the most mainstream of official types in an over-the-top mode that, bare months ago, would have been confined to the distant pe­riph­eries of political argument. There’s Senator Joe Biden, the very definition of a mainstream man, grilling Secretary of State Con­doleez­za Rice about whether she believes the ad­min­is­tra­tion already has the authority to attack Iran and swearing, if she does, that it "will generate a con­sti­tu­tion­al con­fronta­tion in the Senate, I predict to you." (You can add the ex­cla­ma­tion point …continue.

The popular 1632 series is a shared universe of alternate history, where the small town of Grantville, West Virginia has somehow been trans­port­ed in a Ring of Fire to central Germany in 1631, during the middle of the Thirty Years’ War. The towns­peo­ple adapt fairly suc­cess­ful­ly and im­me­di­ate­ly and ir­rev­o­ca­bly change the course of history, thanks to their advanced technology.

The Ring of Fire has spawned an active community at 1632.org, leading to a great deal of fan fiction, developing plot lines, fleshing out major and minor characters, as …continue.

Gmail’s Mail Fetcher now works for me! As of today, I can now read my reilly.org email through Gmail, instead of the crappy webmail interface that Ne­tI­den­ti­ty provides. Much, much nicer.

I still prefer to read my email with a real email client, like Thun­der­bird, but I don’t have POP3 access from work.

In related news, it looks like anyone can sign up for Gmail. You no longer need to be invited.

In my post about Printf Tricks a couple of years ago, I mentioned that "%n is dangerous and disabled by default in Visual Studio 2005."

I got email today from someone who was porting a large codebase to VS 2005. He was getting an assert from %n and he needed a way to get past it. He intends to fix the uses of %n when he has a chance.

I spent several minutes digging around in MSDN and came up with set_print­f_­coun­t_out­put. Wikipedia’s Format string attack page led me to Exploiting Format String Vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, which describes in detail how %n (and %s) may be exploited.

In short, if you have printf(un­val­i­dat­ed_user_in­put), instead of …continue.

Last year, the Washington State Supreme Court handed down its wrong­head­ed decision on same-sex marriage.

In a delightful piece of political theater, WA-DOMA has just filed ballot initiative I-957:

If passed by Washington voters, the Defense of Marriage Initiative would:

• add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;
• require that couples married in Washington file proof of pro­cre­ation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage au­to­mat­i­cal­ly annulled;
• require that couples married out of state file proof of pro­cre­ation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as “un­rec­og­nized;”
• establish a process for filing proof of pro­cre­ation; and
• make it a …continue.

Via Andrew Sullivan, an extremely well cut YouTube mashup of Doctor Who and Monty Python.