For some more context, this was the OP's previous question in Stackoverflow.

http://serverfault.com/questions/420877/ive-inherited-a-rats...

Doesn't that change the entire question!

If there was a burning smell in that, yikes, hit the Big Red Button and turn in your resignation.

Seeing that rats nest I would have let it burn!

The number of times I have spent 10 minutes staring at the output of 'pgrep processname' , when I had attached gdb to the process in another terminal session... Urgh!! :-/

To folks who think C code is in general a mess of Pointers, macros, and goto's - Go download Postgres codebase,build cscope,open vim.. and try browsing the code.

Arguably, one of the most beautiful C-code bases you can get hold off.

I just did. I agree with you.

Nice article, with good related references-an excellent read-Didn't know about Tcp incast before- good way to start a Saturday morning!

One of them got arrested for the unpardonable offense of "liking" the post of the other.

Buddha had summarized that very succinctly "What we think, we become " :-)

"You'll go where you're looking. Don't look down or you'll fall over."

Motorcycle training

As someone who writes C code for a distributed system that uses event-driven callbacks ( Zscaler) (yes,the binding is at compile time), I was aghast when I saw goto's in the codebase. I mean,I believed programmers were indoctrinated with " using goto = goto hell". I have realized that if used smartly,goto's cause no problem-say in error handling. I can confidently say I have not seen a single bug because of improper usage of goto in the last 1.7 years. And we do a lot of interesting things in C,including talking to a Postgres database,having a messaging protocol layer,doing shared memory manipulation etc.

This just demonstrated a proof of concept that 26/11 mumbai style attack is possible on U.S soil. That is a very,very dangerous thing.

Coordinated attacks have always been possible on US soil and have been made even more so by the response to 9/11 (e.g. big group of people piled together in front of every security line). It's not a "very, very dangerous thing". There is always something that is vulnerable, and yet no one has exploited this yet. Has this world-wide cabal of highly advanced terrorists someone missed this vulnerability that I noticed the first time I flew after 9/11?

India has a history of terrorist attacks from islamic extremists (largely originating in pakistan). The US has no such history.

A Mumbai-style attack will always be possible, on any soil. It's not possible to secure entire cities of millions of people against a handful of people with rifles and grenades.

I was thinking this should have been the topmost comment on this story- Surprised that not many people here seem to have read this,for if they had- this 'story' should have been the first thing they commented on.

Probably, the key part of what you said, is "couple of comments". Makes a huge difference if the same convention is on,say, 100,000 LOC, and the people who wrote it didnt give proper comments and left the company! :P

Speaking on naming conventions: This is the name of a class in Chromium source code (C++): 'BufferedSpdyFramerVisitorInterface' . The codebase is that meticulous! For a guy who wanted to learn about browser implementation,and downloaded the codebase,this is good.

These meticulous naming conventions- has it anything to do with using a full-blown ide vs vim?

> These meticulous naming conventions- has it anything to do with using a full-blown ide vs vim?

What would you think that?

If it's because of auto-complete, please understand that this is 2012, and vim is not [just] vi. There are several different flavors of auto-complete available in vim; some built in, some as extensions.

Not to mention that there's eclim for full-scale Eclipse completion and ctags which provides almost the same functionality (though not as intelligently).