grammar bytes

vulnerability in Link Grammar, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise an application using the affected code.

The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error within the "separate_word()" function in tokenize.c when processing overly long words (over 61 bytes). This can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted sentence passed to the "separate_sentence()" function.

Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code.

The vulnerability is confirmed in version 4.1b. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution:
Do not parse untrusted text using the affected function. The painter John Pomara's latest work, at Barry Whistler Gallery, is all about space – the flat space of the aluminum surface, filtered openings in a digital universe and the recumbent realm of a building's facade shown shadowlike, on the ground, and foreshortened.


Barry Whistler Gallery
Digital-dating 5, 2007, by John Pomara Mr. Pomara has broadened his grammar of form. In addition to lustrous flat surfaces in which digital pixels come across as flat building facades, as in the bold aqua Luv-connection 2 and the fluorescent green Double-parking, Mr. Pomara has introduced a new bevy of lines and grids that recede in space.

Outer-limits offers a gorgeous play of flat and receding lines in baby blue and on unpainted aluminum. Two boxy buildings interconnected by a raised walkway are finite in their flatness, while a dark blue grid structure recedes to infinity underneath.

In a blue that is more aqua than baby with trail lines in sunflower yellow, Digital-dating 5 shows two buildings similarly interconnected in space. Fallen in front of the architecture are the building's mirrorlike reflections in distorted foreshortened form. It is reminiscent of Ed Ruscha's adept paintings of labels and script in various fonts. Mr. Pomara deftly demonstrates his acrobatic expertise in rendering objects in space.

In an adjacent gallery, Mr. Pomara ventures into the space of video and mass-media print. Created with the technical assistance of Kim Smith, Mr. Pomara's Bites-bytes is a video in various shades of electric blue showing his buildings dancing, copulating and shattered into thousands of roving bits.

Facing the video is a wall of 54 archival pigment ink-jet prints on glossy paper. The wall is an exercise in the belief that there can be great difference of repetition and variety in the mass-produced. Digital sketches in bright colors repeat on the wall, each showing a distinct play of geometric form. No two are alike.

Charissa N. Terrnova

•"Digital Dating," by John Pomara, continues through Nov. 24 at Barry Whistler Gallery, 2909-B Canton St. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and by appointment. Free. 214-939-0242, www.barrywhistlergallery.com.

Raychael Stine at Road Agent

The young painter Raychael Stine tells stories. Combining abstract gesture and realistic delineation, Ms. Stine enlists narrative, not in linear fashion with a beginning, middle and end, but in still, disjunctive fragments. She tells a fable of dominance, submission and wily beguilement in iconic animal form set within landscapes of swirling abstract paint.


Road Agent Gallery
In the Belly 2, 2007, by Raychael Stine At Road Agent, In the Belly 2 depicts a rat's underside slithering through a depthless field of handsome brushstrokes. Putty-colored paint to the left of the bucktooth rodent is thick and flat. An eddy of pink, black and striated blue envelops the animal, creating a tension between real and abstract space.

Hers are tales in which animals – Weimaraners, dachshunds, rats and weasels – become symbols of the four age-old humors: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic.

Dachshunds abound in Ms. Stine's fields of paint. In The Boring of the Holes, four dachshunds floating in space embody the diligence of the commanding characteristic of the choleric humor. Based on her dog Pickle, these dachshunds are undeterred in their search for something subterranean, while two rats give life to the sanguine temperament of stealthy bloodlust.

Ms. Stine proves that a dachshund is a many-splendored thing. Nest shows a more vulnerable wiener dog. Curled up in a current of multicolored paint en route to a snooze, this nested pup expresses sentiment on the phlegmatic-melancholic axis of humors.

C.N.T.

•"Dogs, Rats and Weasels," by Raychael Stine, continues through Nov. 24 at Road Agent, 2909-A Canton St. Hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. 214-749-4049, www.road-agent.com.

Annabel Daou at Conduit Gallery

Images – from photographs, films and television – form our lives. Reinforcing the role of idea as image, New York artist Annabel Daou mines the Internet for images that take form in words. In a discussion of "Sex & Politics," her portion of a three-artist show at Conduit Gallery, Ms. Daou asks, "What do we actually see?"


Conduit Gallery
Installment 96, 2007, by Annabel Daou The small ink-on-paper works of 1-96 Installments come across like a thunder of white noise after the lightning strike of the computer on-button. Ms. Daou has hung on the wall in harum-scarum rhythm a bounty of handwritten texts mounted in pickled-wood square frames, all 7 by 71/2 by 2 inches.

Some show sketches of human forms and buildings, but most are streams and swirls of words. Displacing her own authorship to the collectivity of the network, she has pilfered the texts from online. Discussions of sex acts and the Roman emperor Hadrian abut quotes from the Oxford Book of Death and the 72 Virgin Quiz, the notorious terrorist video game.

The rambling of Ms. Daou's words softens the blow of politics. On the one hand, the verbiage of her texts seems but an aimless flow of chatter. But it offers a very poignant thesis on the state of politics in the Middle East. Ms. Daou seems to be telling those of us who work and play at computers not to lose sight of serious realities amid the welter of words and icons that make screenplay.

Installed in the corner of the gallery amid the text pieces is the sound piece Strange Bedfellows, by Ms. Daou and Amy and Greta Byrum. Ms. Daou's voice emanates from MP3 players hidden behind two small-framed copper plates. Gallerygoers hear in monotones fragmentary phrases about politics and pop culture.