I recognized the problem on sight; we solved this exact issue but since it was MTA software we knew about periods being special. Unfortunately, people are often solving problems that many others have solved. Maybe AI will allow the lines to be connected or solve for known edge cases like a dot in the smtp data
The curious case of the missing period
91–100 of 201 posts
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#92Show of hands: Who knew exactly where this was going as soon as "SMTP" was mentioned?
As soon as "missing period" was mentioned I suspected it would be about SMTP.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#93Why would a cron job that sends e-mails need to implement its own SMTP client??? You just use the mail program from mailutils or whatever. Just from a point of view of deliverability, developing bare bones SMTP interaction over a socket is a nonstarter. You can't just connect to random mail exchange hosts directly and send mail these days. A solution has to be capable of connecting to a specific SMTP forwarding host…
There's no universe where I'd trust that there's already some binary on the system to send mail for me, but I definitely wouldn't roll my own. For any reasonable language, there's a multitude of SMTP client libraries available if there's not already one in the stdlib.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#94I have two kids. The case is not curious at all.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#95I recognized the problem on sight; we solved this exact issue but since it was MTA software we knew about periods being special. Unfortunately, people are often solving problems that many others have solved. Maybe AI will allow the lines to be connected or solve for known edge cases like a dot in the smtp data
you know, now that you mention this, i think i have heard of this exact problem before, perhaps from the late 90s; the "full stop on a line by itself" itched a bit, probably for that reason as well.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#96[flagged]
I'm sorry to hear that but this is not really the time or the place for personal stories.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#97I will not comment on the technical part, as others already did it better than I could, but it just reminded me of an anecdote that reminds of the importance of such trivial things as a period at the end of a sentence: In Germany, where I work, it is usual at the end of employement to ask for a letter of recommendation ("Zeugnis") that lists the tasks performed, and how good the employee was. It is an important docum…
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Re: The curious case of the missing period
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
So.. secret codes are a myth, and here are some examples of secret codes?
Please refrain from willingly picking the naive interpretation when you've understood my point perfectly fine, it's against the rules of this website. ...sigh: Secret codes as in "watermark-level omission of characters" are a myth. Lingo and jargon do however exist, and convey meaning in a particularly subtle way. They are shared and taught by culture, not by a secret handbook passed down from generation to generatio…
This reminds me of the joke whose punch line is
> You will be lucky to have this person work for you.
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don’t vendor your dependencies. The alternative seems worse: your own application's stability is now at risk against upstream changes that could break your code. Sure, you might not get a fix immediately, but I'd rather know I'm making a change because I need a fix than introducing instability and additional risk that I don't want to subject myself to. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I like Go's approach, which ensures that all upgrades happen when you choose to do some upgrades. (For apps, a lock file will do it too.)
Taking dependency updating to the extreme, some Google projects adopt a "live at head" philosophy, where their projects depend on their dependencies' top-of-tree main commits, not a release branch:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/third_...
Re: The curious case of the missing period
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
That why you have to read the specs of the protocol you want to implement. Its a matter of engineering rigorousness. Brute-forcing until "it works" doesn't cut it.
I think you're missing the fact that experience has taught us repeatedly that separating the protocol definition from the wire format is a good idea. But sure, feel free to ignore the many lessons and blame it on individuals as if anything could be implemented free from human laziness, error, & economic demands (which btw is ironically a lack of engineering rigour which I was always taught as you assume that humans w…
Yeah someone should get in their Time Machine and tell those idiot SMTP RFC authors in the 1980s that they should have used a wire format that wouldn’t be invented for another 30 years.