Search Results: "spa"

19 January 2006

Riku Voipio: Bad homework

Roland Fails at homework, and Wouter gets detention for copying Rolands homework. Any given spam detection method is workaroundable, but uribl happens to be one the hardest ones so far.

What Roland is missing, is that spamassassin 3.0:s uribl module checks against the domain names too. So if cheap-placebo-meds.biz points to zombie servers at unblacklisted ip addressess, It will still get a score if cheap-placebo-meds.biz is already blacklisted as a domain.

They could still drop the domain from the url entirely, and just add an zombie IP, but that would be terribly unreliable. The zombie-hosted sites I have seen usually had 10-15 round-robin addressess, of which 2-3 actually responded.

Another escalation spammers could do is to buy (more) throwaway domains. But there is already work to detect fresh/throway domains and list them, since typically spammer domains are less than one month old.

But if zombie hosted spammer sites come a big problem, the uribl module can check against dial-up blacklists as well, of course at the great annoyance of everyone who has web site on their dial-up and advertisize it to their friends via email...

What spammers will probably start doing, is setting up (more) gateway/redirection sites on various free webspace sites like geocities, or start obfuscating their addressess (isn't that poetic justice: "please go to cheap dash meds 123 dot biz". In any case, their links will look more suspicous than before, which hopefully will damage their sales.

In other news, excuse me, it's nice that GNU has locales and standard ways of doing things, but does /bin/true really need all this??

Riku Voipio: I hate installing computers

Now, suppose you get a new laptop and a desktop, more time will be wasted installing Linux on the laptop? Wrong. The Ibm Thinkpad x40 installed pretty much without a glitch. Of course, to avoid the problems [info]mjg59 had I chose a x40 with builtin wlan, so I saved my from some grief I could have hit.

The desktop (Dell optiplex gx270) installed fine all the way to X - ok, so the frigging xfree86 config still doesn't work I thought. Again, wrong. After half a day of fighting, I got it in 640x480 resolution at 256 colors. But nothing better. A posting on the dell forums revealed the cause - Dell has been shipping machines with broken bios for half an year! Am I the only one this gives the creepy "we support only windows" feeling? Unsuprisingly, the suggested BIOS downgrade refused. So I was stuck for some days with 640x480. Finally. finding out Christian Zietz had written a hack around it, I actually have an usable desktop!

Personally, using d-i has been a more pleasant experience than bootfloppies ever was. Thanks for everyone involved!

On the embedded hardware front I have not been as frustrated as liw. Trimming a minimal debian which still has all the needed hardware support and fits into the memory limits _is_ on the other hand frustrating - netbase drags an inetd and bluez drags in gconf,orbit and almost half of gnome(!).

Riku Voipio: busy-busy-busy

Data, so you chose Vacation, sunny Spain and Brazil, Amaya and all the other nice people instead of Work, rainy and cold[1] Finland and me? Why would you do that? I'm so disappointed!

My old work doesn't want to leave me, they are still calling me. I guess I didn't document my doings well enough.. That, new job and planning my move in the end of month (which unfortunatly collides with debconf), which means a busy month ahead. Tp prevent stress forehand, I chose to unsubscribe (again!) the most high-volume low signal/noise ratio mailing lists, like debian-devel.

Finding of the day:

apt-cache dotty netbase dot -Tps kghostview -

Now, I just need something similar for build-depends too.

[1] Actually I lied, it's been a very nice weather this week. But I'm sure this is just a temporary quirk.

Riku Voipio: Random tidbits

Funkysoul complained that my comments are too techy, while some debian planet readers would probably complain about too unrelated stuff... Well luckily for planeters, there is not much nontechnical stuff in my life :P

[real life]
Soon 5 hours of travel ahead. Being trapped living far away from your girlfriend is not fun. Long train trip means ofcourse that All I can do for a while is read. So atleast I get forward in reading my school stuff...

It was over 0 celsius out today, and sun was shining, so I thought it would be nice day to eat the summer's first icecream outdoors. yum!

[hacking]
Not much of this recently. Cleaning kde packages bugs. Also find out I'm not a very good programming teacher to complete beginners... For a school Database application project, wrote a postgreSQL backed dnsbl to track spammer domains (for spamassassin URL matching). Aparrently the db schema and web frontend impressed, so I got full points :-) Unfortunatly real life hit ratio isn't that impressive.

Axel Beckert: New talk proposal, new Linux distribution found

After talking with some LinuxTag guys about which kind of talks are still missing for the upcoming LinuxTag, I submitted another proposal for a still only roughly sketched talk: KISS – Keep it simple and stupid, also on the web.
KISS – “Keep it simple and stupid” is an old and successful principle in the Unix world: Small and simple programs, doing only one thing, but they’re doing perfect, fast and reliable. This principle can also work on the web and make webservers or surf terminals out of already discharged computers.
I planned to show “simple” (or at least “simple to use”) tools like Blosxom or the Website Meta Language, a more slim webserver than Apache (e.g. fefe’s fnord or one of the ACME webservers thttpd, mini_httpd or micro_httpd), slim web-browsers (e.g. like Dillo, Opera, glinks, ViewML or Minimo) and one or more Linux distributions optimized for low end PCs. While thinking about low end PCs, usually the following distributions come to my mind: DeLi Linux, fli4l and Debian Woody. But none of them seems to fit for my talk as perfectly as I would like: Since I first read about viewml on the DeLi Linux page, I looked for Debian packages of viewml today. apt-cache search hasn’t found anything on Woody or Sarge and packages.debian.org is still down, so I used Google. I found out, that there at least was a viewml package in Debian since at least 2001, so I expect, it just didn’t make it to stable. But I also found this interesting page on a webserver called www.ubuntulite.org. Ubuntu Lite? That sounds very interesting, since I see Ubuntu not as the baddest idea (expect for it’s horribly resource hunger and only offering one package per application by default ;-), but having an Ubuntu derivative prepackaged for low end PCs and with several webbrowsers instead of only Epiphany (and probably Firefox, don’t they?) would be perfect for my purpose. So I’m currently downloading an Ubuntu Lite ISO and will give it a try on one of my Pentium MMX boxes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support Pentium I or AMD K5 since Ubuntu itself only supports i686 and upwards. :-/ But this also means, that it’s no occasion for my Pentium I Compaq LTE 5100 (which I probably will name pony), but currently, after Bartosz’ recent post on Planet Debian, it looks like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could also be an interesting OS, since it fits all requirements perfectly: Free, Modern, Exotic and all conveniences of Debian. ;-)

Now Playing: Jefferson Starship — We Built This City

Uwe Hermann: kitty, a Qt/KDE based RSS podcast and video aggregator, is now in unstable

kitty screenshot As mentioned earlier, I wanted to package the KDE videoblog client kitty for Debian. I finally found the time to really do it, and the package has entered Debian unstable a few days ago. The first bug has already been reported (sigh), but I'm working on it. kitty got even mentioned in Debian Weekly News (w00t!)

Steve Kemp: You are the perfect drug

I’m sure the people at debianhelp.co.uk are great, but I’m sick of their spamming. I guess I’m no better though :S In other Debian news today I’m usubscribing from debian-user, debian-project, and debian-devel. I find my patience for arguments waning.

Simon Law: Debian meetup

 ____       _     _               __  __           _               
   _ \  ___   __ (_) __ _ _ __      \/    ___  ___   _ _   _ _ __  
       / _ \ '_ \   / _    '_ \     \/   / _ \/ _ \ __        '_ \ 
   _     __/  _)     (_                    __/  __/  _   _     _)  
 ____/ \___ _.__/ _ \__,_ _   _   _    _ \___ \___ \__ \__,_  .__/ 
                                                             _
So what does a Debian beer stein have to do with this gathering?

Debian stein
Absolutely everything! We're getting together a bunch of Debian Developers in Montr al to drink and chat. There are rumours that you can even get your GnuPG key signed, if you buy enough rounds. What a great deal! Thusly, the beer goes down and the trust scores rise! The relevant details:
Who:
The Debian community.
Where:
Hurley's Irish Pub
Date:
Saturday, 7 January 2006.
Time:
17:00 or 5 PM.

Simon Law: lists.nit.ca

I suppose it would be a good time to mention that http://open.nit.ca is up and running on a nice new server in Montr al. That's the website that hosts all of NITI's free software offerings. About two months ago, our mailing lists were eaten by a disk failure. We've managed to get the archives back, from our subscription lists are all gone. But I've got them up and running now, on GNU Mailman no less, and have subscribed some people to them. They have doubtlessly noticed this because spammers have been hitting two of our mailing lists like crazy. After going into denial for a while, I have decided that I ought to moderate these posts. Oh hey. The new XPLC got into Debian. Too bad we realised that we need to kick in another change soon. Ah well. I look forward to pushing out a WvDial release over the holidays, as it really needs to get out the door now.

David Pashley: Mozilla causing XSS in Livejournal

As mentioned in my last entry, Livejournal have changed their url scheme to get around a problem in mozilla. The trouble is down to the -moz-binding CSS property. I'll repost a copy of the short lived posting to the lj_dev community earlier.
Discussing the URL Change As we recently announced in [info]news, we have changed the canonical URL of most journal, community, and syndicated content. While we did offer subdomains to Paid users in the past, this is now the canonical URL that we will link and redirect to for all journals. However, all communities are located at http://community.livejournal.com/username and syndicated accounts at http://syndicated.livejournal.com/username. Due to the way certain proxy servers are configured, and the fact that the HTTP RFC prohibits it, the canonical URL for journals with a username starting with an underscore will be http://users.livejournal.com/username. We are however offering a free rename if you fall into this group. So now the technical side of all of this and why it was a required change; bear with me as its 3am my time and I'm sitting in John F. Kennedy Airport after a five hour flight. Late last week we become aware that it was possible to use the "-moz-binding" CSS attribute within Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox to execute arbitrary offsite JavaScript. As this attribute is designed to allow attaching an XBL transform and JavaScript to any node within the DOM, it is quite easy to use in a malicious fashion. We immediately altered our cleaner to strip this attribute from entries and comments, though also realized that wasn't even half the battle. As we allow custom CSS in many of our styles, as well as the ability to link to an external stylesheet in a variety of fashions, it was quite possible to take advantage of this exploit and hijack the session cookie of any user who views your journal. As we, along with many other sites, used one cookie to authenticate a user, this cookie was quite powerful if stolen. If the user had not chosen to bind their cookie to their IP address, a malicious user could steal it, login as that user, deface the account and SPAM with it, as well as modify that user's style to include the exploit thus causing this problem to spread much like a virus. Borrowing the idea from another development team within Six Apart, we decided we needed to break our cookies into three categories. One cookie would be our application management cookie, this cookie would only be accessible on www.livejournal.com where we will not display untrusted content. A second cookie will be accessible on all subdomains of livejournal.com, though it only will say if you are logged in or not; it is solely for optimization. We then will issue one cookie for each journal you visit. This cookie will be only accessible on username.livejournal.com or community.livejournal.com/username as it is limited to a single journal. This cookie will only grant you the permission to read protected entries and post in the particular journal. This means that if the journal owner steals your cookie, they will be able to do nothing more than view their journal and comment upon it as if they are you. In the end you will have n+2 cookies, with n being the number of journals you visit. Due to the fact that we cannot clean every external CSS stylesheet linked to every time we generate a journal page, this change is required. While it does not fully protect us from some new cross site scripting vulnerability that can be exploited via entries or comments, they are much easier to block, patch, and recover from quickly. With Mozilla deciding to allow the execution of arbitrary JavaScript via CSS, there is no other viable solution than the one we have undertaken. We developed a plan to phase all of this in over the next week, URL change first and then followed by the cookie change, though this morning we were made aware that this was being actively exploited. As such we took our week time line and shortened it to about twelve hours. While URLs have been changed at this time, our cookie handling change has not yet happened. This should however be expected to take place within the next day or two as well as various other cleanups and fixing bugs we've already encountered. Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions and open a support request if you find a bug or encounter a problem. Sorry all of this came with just about zero warning, but in the end we could not wait longer to fix this problem.
Thanks to Daniel Silverstone for providing me with a cache copy of the text.

Martin F. Krafft: GMX sells registered mail as security feature

My brother wanted to send me a sensitive document, so he followed the suggestion by his provider (GMX) to use their feature called "registered mail") ("Einschreiben"). Here's how it works:
  1. The sender composes an Email and checks the option "registered mail"
  2. GMX stores the email on their servers, generates an access code, and sends the access code with a URL to the intended recipient -- plain text, of course.
  3. The recipient surfs to the URL and accepts (or declines).
  4. GMX then acknowledges acceptance to the sender and forwards the email to the original recipient address -- plain text, of course.
I suppose the feature does what the name suggests, namely to offer the sender a way to check whether the recipient has received the email. What pisses me off is that they sell it as a way to securely send emails on the Internet. I think providers spreading fud like this should have their "licence" revoked and be condemned to practice encryption with an abacus over a 2400 baud modem line! PS: If this isn't bad, the email sent to the intended recipient doesn't properly encode special characters in the headers, which is why some content scanners (like my amavisd-new) will discard or bounce it.

Clint Adams: Not adjusted for inflation

Twice upon a time, there was a corporation called Company B. Ironically, their bugle player quit two days before the beginning of this story. Two days after the bugle player quit, something sinister was happening at Company B. To better understand it, we need to go back in time a bit. So this next part happens well before the beginning of the story. Once upon a time, Company B was run by a middle-management team known as Team Alfalfa. These guys were young and na ve and inexperienced, but idealistic and somewhat morally pure. They certainly didn't expect the bugle player to quit. They were surprised by almost every one of the things to come. When they hired a Belarussian, they were surprised when he quit shortly thereafter and moved to Hampshire County in Massachusetts. They were surprised when the owners of Company B hired Team Buckwheat. Team Buckwheat was a group of power-hungry jerks, who were hired because they had Experience and Vision. Company B needed to grow, because Progress is important, and anyway, how else would the owners be able to bilk the company of millions of dollars through fraud and mismanagement if the company didn't grow big enough to amass millions of dollars in the first place? The thirst for power was great within each member of Team Buckwheat, and they collectively vowed to take over the company. Through trickery and deceit, they sabotaged Team Alfalfa. Team Alfalfa mistakenly believed that its power hold was strong and that it could threaten to hold the company's business hostage, but it was very much mistaken. Slowly but surely, Team Buckwheat started to drive Team Alfalfa out of the company until only two members remained. In fact, their lust was so great that they began vying for power amongst themselves before they had succeeded completely in their purge of the ranks of Team Alfalfa. They employed evil and complicated manipulations and machinations, until only two of them remained as well. As only two, they were much less powerful, and as they saw the danger and became afraid, they clung to one another and allied. Losing faith in Team Buckwheat, the owners of Company B hired the Grey Knight to continue the work of rapidly growing the company in order to make enormous profits. The Grey Knight came in and exuded Calmness and Rationalness, and provided a stark contrast to the meanness and cruelty that Team Buckwheat inflicted upon its subordinates. So some unlikely bedfellows among the grunts and peons formed an alliance, and with the reluctant aid of the Grey Knight, they had the remnants of Team Buckwheat fired based on flimsy pretexts, while the remnants of Team Alfalfa watched from the sidelines. The peons and grunts were na ve and overly hopeful in the Grey Knight, who was not as noble as he seemed. After a few months of everything functioning better than it had ever done before, he brought in his friends, Team Corn. Team Corn was power-hungry as well, but more patient. Unlike Team Buckwheat, which had been cobbled together from strangers, Team Corn stuck together and moved from company to company, leaving waves of disgust and resentment in its wake. These people immediately took steps to secure their power base. Where things had been transparent and group-oriented before, they were made obscure and individualized. Each project was assigned to a single person. All communication regarding each project was required to go directly and privately to the responsible person. Discussing a project with anyone else was a breach of protocol. If the responsible person fell sick or left the country for mysterious reasons, all activity on that project would cease. Accomplishments were discouraged, and simulating the appearance of much effort and progress was encouraged. The members of Team Corn were stunted in their moral development. They believed that one was either with them or against them. Those who chose to be sycophants were given rewards and promotions, no matter how incompetent and unqualified they were. Those who did not were oppressed and punished. Objections and questions to ill-advised policies were met with hostility, and if anyone ever took a principled stand, Team Corn became fraught with confusion; they could not conceive of a reason one might act for the greater good or based on conscience rather than to do what would advance one's own interests. After a very long time, this fundamental lack of comprehension of their own evil led to their downfall, but that small bit of justice was tempered when Team Durum came in to replace them. Team Durum wasn't as bad as Team Corn, but boy did it suck.

17 January 2006

Jos Parrella: Authenticating users from several groups

Today I had my first encounter with authenticated proxies (creepy). The client has a working LDAP directory and Samba servers for logins in their network, and until now they have plain old packet forwarding for WWW access. They didn’t even had Squid caching as a transparent proxy, and they suddenly wanted to authenticate users against the directory, and give particular access to users of certain groups. Luis was working on this using winbind and ntlm_auth in Squid (all from their corresponding packages in Sarge) and he was using the –require-membership-of stanza on auth_param. So his configuration was basically: This approach didn’t work as it meant to be used, since only the first authenticator worked. Seems like Squid parses the list of authenticators and only work with the first one. So only one group can be allowed to use the proxy this way, as far as I understand. I googled a bit through some Russian forums and started solving some problems with winbind and Samba themselves: no domain separators, no stanzas for winbind in the smb.conf (winbind use default domain = yes), bad mappings for uids and gids, etc. Then I found out about wbinfo_group.pl, a Squid helper written in PerlOfCourse which can find out the group of a certain user trying to authenticate with the proxy. So I thought that maybe this way I could made specific acl’s for each group and even control other stuff in Squid using the group. I made this in this way: This is magically working, and I think there’s more flexibility with this than the other way, but I’m not an expert and I have questions that will be answered in this week, hopefully:

Uwe Hermann: Genie 1693 PDA - what can I do with it?

Genie 1693 PDA I'm rich! I won the lottery this weekend! I won 8.70 Euros in total... Of course I went out to spend the huge amounts of money I now possess on some ultimately useless gadget. I got myself a Genie 1693 PDA thing. Which costs 13 Euros. Next time I'll have to win more money ;) Anyways, the gadget has 384 KB of memory, a touchscreen, and a serial cable to connect it to a computer. Let's see if I can come up with something interesting to do with this thing (suggestions welcome). I was thinking in the direction of putting my own software on it (I don't think that'll work) or reverse engineering the communication protocol or whatever comes to my mind when I'm bored...

16 January 2006

Holger Levsen: debconf-es 2 videos available

The videos from debconf.es 2 are now online (actually they will be at 18 UTC). Which is good and makes me happy...

But there are still some problems, so you should not mirror them (yet):

1. The low quality mpegs are a too big for my taste.

2. The good quality oggs have too low quality.

3. The kde talk is only available encoded with xvid, and nothing else. Expect high quality xvids of all talks and a mpg/ogg version of the kde talk soon.

4. I have no idea what this is - any hints welcome.

5. ATM the slides are "only" available on www.debian.org.es not yet on meetings-archive.debian.net

I very much appreciate feedback, esp. on the following topics:

1. During some talks there is quite a lot of zooming, is that good or bad?

2. Due to the camera position, some people in the audience could only be captured from the back (while they are talking). Is that good or bad ?

3. A better licence for this kind of stuff

4. The filenames: Should they contain a chronological number of the talk ? Spanish filenames might also be better/nicer, feel free to send me a translated list ;-)

5. For all talks - except the kde talk - ffmpeg and ffmpeg2theora were used for encoding. (BTW, anybody knows another theora encoder? ffmpeg2theora is slllllllow.) For some strange reasons this didn't work for the kde talk, so I've used mencoder for it. Maybe I should upload the 12GB raw-dv file of the kde talk as well, so people can debug this ?

The exact command lines I've used are documented on my video page - this page is pretty much work in progress and will be updated as I find better solutions for the above mentioned problems.

Debconf-es 2 happened a month ago. When asked back then, I gave today as the ultimate release day. Then my life has become much busier than expected, and as a result the videos are in this unfinished state. Do you appreciate them being released like this today or do you think I should have released them when they are ready ? (Which might be in two weeks or more as I'm still very busy. IMO it's good to have them (even in bad quality only (at first)) ASAP.

Pierre Habouzit: whitelister 0.4 (SPF) and aaege ....

I recently released whitelister and uploaded it to debian (ITP#312309). the major thing is the integration of the SPF as a new method to detect suspicious mail. It's nice, it blocks most of the spam coming from @hotmail.com addresses. Moreover, the source repository is endly public. it's hosted on the subversion repository : 
  svn co https://svn.aaege.org/mailtools/trunk/whitelister/
  svn co https://svn.aaege.net/mailtools/trunk/whitelister/
and we have a trac set up (the wiki docs are in french, sorry) with :

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: It s runoff time

Update: Corrected Tarja Halonen’s total vote percentage. The preliminary count in the Finnish presidential elections is finished with the following results:
Candidate Total votes Votes short of next* Pre-poll
pos %
Tarja Halonen 1,396,161 46,3 % not applicable 1st 52
Sauli Niinist 725,213 24,1 % 670,948 48 % 2nd 20
Matti Vanhanen 561,556 18.6 % 163,657 23 % 3rd 18
Heidi Hautala 105,086 3.5 % 456,470 81 % 4th 4
Timo Soini 103,368 3.4 % 1,718 2 % 4th 4
Bjarne Kallis 61,458 2.0 % 41,910 41 % 6th 1
Henrik Lax 48,639 1.6 % 12,819 21 % 6th 1
Arto Lahti 13,041 0.4 % 35,598 73 % 6th 1
* The difference between the current candidate and the next (upward) candidate on the list, in votes and as a percentage of the next (upward) candidate’s votes.
The result of the last opinion poll published before the election, commissioned by YLE and conducted by phone between 10th and 11th of January. The margin for error is 2,5 %-points for Halonen and decreases when the percentage decreases. Since the incumbent failed to reach majority, a runoff election will be held on the 29th of January between the two best placed candidates (starred). A remarkable fact is the low number of votes that the independent candidate Arto Lahti received, for he had to get at least 20,000 people to sign their name in favour of his candidacy, while he received only 65 % of that number in votes. It is very likely that both runoff candidates retain the votes they received today. What decides the runoff election is how the rest of the voters behave. As a quick and dirty Stetson Harrison estimate, most of Vanhanen, Kallis and Lax’s spporters are likely to vote for Niinist , while most of Hautala’s supporters are likely to vote for Halonen. Assuming that the “most”s cancel each other (an assumption that probably favours Niinist ), this yields an additional 22.2 %-points for Niinist (total 46.3 %) and 3.5 %-points for Halonen (total 49.8 %). Hence it would seem that Halonen has the upper hand in runoff. A few words on each of the eight candidates, in reverse order of popularity, follows. Arto Lahti (b. 1949) is a professor of entrepeneurship and has experience in various positions in the private sector. He has no prior political experience and is not affiliated with a political party. Henrik Lax (b.1946) is a Member of the European Parliament since 2004, representing the liberal Swedish People’s Party. He was a Member of the national Parliament 1987 2004. Prior to his political career, he had been a lawyer. Bjarne Kallis (b.1945) is a Member of Parliament since 1991, representing the party currently called Christian Democrats. He has chaired his party since 1995. For most of his non-political professional life he has been a teacher and later principal in a business school. Timo Soini (b. 1962) is a Member of Parliament since 2003, representing the right-wing populist True Finns party. He has chaired his party since 1997, which he cofounded in 1995; prior to that, he was an active member of the since-dissolved Finnish Agrarian Party. Heidi Hautala (b. 1955) is a Member of Parliament since 2003 and before that 1991 1995. She was a Member of the European Parliament 1995 2003. She represents the evironmental-liberal Green League, a party she cofounded and later chaired 1987 1991. Matti Vanhanen (b. 1955) is Prime Minister since 2003, representing the liberal Centre Party. He previously served as Minister of Defense in 2003. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1991. He has chaired his party since 2003. Sauli Niinist (b. 1948) is currently a Director at the European Investment Bank. He served as Minister of Justice 1995 1996 and Minister of Finance 1996 2003. He was a Member of Parliament 1987 2003. He represents the liberal-conservative National Coalition party, which he chaired 1994 2001. Prior to his political career, he worked as a lawyer. Tarja Halonen (b. 1943) is the incumbent, Her Excellency the President of the Republic of Finland since 2000. Prior to her presidency, she was a member of the Social Democrat Party and had served as Minister of Social Affairs and Health 1987 1990, Minister of Nordic Cooperation 1989 1991, Minister of Justice 1990 1991 and Minister of Foreign Affairs 1995 2000. She was a Member of Parliament 1979 2000. Prior to her political career, she worked as a lawyer in a labor union.

15 January 2006

Edd Dumbill: A clean sweep

Firstly, if you haven't the faintest interest in the software I use to write this weblog, please feel free to go and do something more interesting right now. Now I'm in the company of dedicated readers of colophons, I will proceed. Redesign and reimplementation  This weblog, which has now been running for over two and a half years, originally ran on some custom software I'd hacked up in Zope: at that time my web development platform of choice. Today, I've relaunched with another custom content management engine, this time written using Rails. It's been a lot of fun to write, and a good excuse to sharpen my Rails skills further. The design has also been fun. It's a little basic right now, but I hope easy to read. Of course, the font is Lucida Grande, which ensures that I am fully Web 2.0 compliant.
The main new feature is that the tags I give articles are now made public. I used to tag posts for my RSS feed, but not publish them on the site. Now they are public--what few tags I currently have--and it's possible to find RSS and Atom feeds just for certain subsections of my writing. I worry sometimes about spamming the various Planet aggregator sites my blog features in, so this gives me a way to direct content specifically at them. That said, at least for Planet XML I like hearing about everything the community members have to say, not just their on-topic posts. New URLs My blog now has a new location, http://times.usefulinc.com/, and new places for  RSS and Atom feeds: Tools used

Edd Dumbill: Are web services and e-business interesting?

A couple of people have commented to me on the lack of explicit reference to web services or e-business technologies in the XTech call for participation. It's worth explaining why this is so. On web services: I consider the low-level specs here (SOAP, REST, WSDL) now to fall under "core technologies" track, and the higher level stuff (WS-*) to be often vacuous spec-mongering. Also, over the years, the quality of web service proposals submitted to the conference has been notably poor compared to all the other topics. A lot of this was to do with the hype web services received. On e-business, some useful submissions have been forthcoming, but never more than a few. My suspicion is that the OASIS stream of events is more interesting for most people in this space--I'd love to hear otherwise. I do view e-business presentations as on-topic, but I would like to find those that genuinely present something worthwhile. While many people often say they'd like to see more case studies, turnout for these is always low at the conference itself, so I've shied away from them somewhat. The thing with case studies is that they're necessarily related to a domain, and it's easy to for attendees to assume there's not transferable experience to be heard. I guess I don't believe either that all the problems in the e-business space are unique to that area. Identity, federated service location, transactions are all topics that deserve a broad audience. However, I acknowledge that I do not work daily in the e-business sphere and I would dearly love to hear somebody who does do a presentation on why there's really some solid things going on there now. Exchange of best practices is more necessary than ever. More reason not to hive off e-business from the other matters in the conference. For a similar reason I've mixed semantic web topics throughout the tracks as well. If anyone working in e-business didn't get useful knowledge out of XTech, I'd be astounded. Likewise, those working in e-business have plenty useful to say to the rest of the conference.
  • only 4 days left to submit a proposal for XTech 2006 (Amsterdam, May 16-19) -- do it now

Edd Dumbill: Emacs font joy

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe: Screenshot of anti-aliased Xft enable Emacs Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules : 
  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes
After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts. There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this: 
  Emacs*font: Monospace-8
You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment. OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.

Next.

Previous.