Chris Lamb: XORLY? Losing your GPG private key safely.
It’s quite convenient to have your GPG private key on your desktop, laptop and USB stick.. but if one of these is stolen or lost, you are pretty much obliged to issue a revocation.
Now, RAID-5 has this wonderful property whereby it is impossible to recover data from an array of size n if you have (at most) n-2 elements. So, one idea would be to create a small loopback device -based array that you can spread around your nice stealable items - you then use your key by combining >= n-1 of them.
..Or Eve must steal n-1 items before she can reconstruct your secret key. You can recover the “missing data” from single lost device, obviously.
There are almost certainly cooler algorithms for this, but none that are in the Linux kernel. Some scriptage that seems to work for me:
#!/bin/sh
set -eu
NUMITEMS=3
SIZE=30
create()
for NUM in $(seq $NUMITEMS);
do
dd if=/dev/zero of=$NUM.img bs=1M count=$(echo "$SIZE/($NUMITEMS-1)" bc)
losetup /dev/loop$NUM $NUM.img
done
sudo mdadm --create -l5 -n$NUMITEMS /dev/md0 $(seq -f "/dev/loop%g" $NUMITEMS)
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0
stop()
sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md0
for NUM in $(seq 1 $NUMITEMS);
do
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop$NUM true
done
start()
# Collect array elements from argv
NUM=0
for ELEM in $ELEMENTS;
do
NUM=$(( $NUM + 1 ))
sudo losetup /dev/loop$NUM "$ELEM"
done
sudo mdadm --assemble --run /dev/md0 $(seq -f "/dev/loop%g" $NUM)
recreate()
# Assume already running
dd if=/dev/zero of=$NUMITEMS.img bs=1M count=$(echo "$SIZE/($NUMITEMS-1)" bc)
losetup /dev/loop$NUMITEMS $NUMITEMS.img
sudo mdadm --add /dev/md0 $NEW
sudo mdadm --misc --wait /dev/md0
(This proof-of-concept script is deliberately broken: you’ll have to write the argument handling yourself and convince yourself you don’t have anything important at /dev/loop* or /dev/md0 or /. It might also make sense to only use the array in read-only mode, or you will have syncing issues.)
Ingenious learners may wish to construct other scenarios with other RAID levels; 5-device RAID-6 would only require 3 elements present to function (or to be stolen by Eve, naturally). Not that I’m actually doing this: it’s almost certainly as stupid as it sounds, I just haven’t thought of a convicing reason yet.
Hit Alt+F2, type notepad, hit enter. An editor window pops up. Something
is very strange, though ... until I realize that KDE has caught my Alt+F2, so
that the “Run Command” box I was typing notepad into was not that
of the Windows session on the terminal connection but the one of my local KDE.
And since I've installed Wine some time ago, there actually is a text editor
called notepad on my local computer which closely resembles the one from
windows.
And the whole thing because apparently Copy and Paste doesn't work from my
local desktop to a (Citrix based) terminal session. (Hmm. Is Alt+F2 even the
correct key combination for Windozes? Update: Several people have
pointed out that it's Start+R in Windows. Thanks, will have to try if that's
put through to the terminal session correctly, then.)
This is not about any particular project, but more a generic thought.
When should be something considered to be stable enough to be released
as 1.0? Over ages I started several projects which are in different
quality right now and this is maybe not completely related to version
they use.
Let's take one of older ones - 
A week ago, I got my fourth cell phone so far. This is the first time, however, that I pay for it - even though the first one I had was a 
Great news: After several weeks of investigating, 
Update: Why don't I learn my lesson and stop working too late? Making a fool of myself in public isn't something to be proud of.
Sadly, I can't seem to get things right re: Fosdem. I got the dates wrong for Fosdem and had to pay extra to change the bookings. Last year I got the flight wrong and had to pay extra to fly from Gatwick instead of Heathrow (and when I got to Brussels there was some bomb alert that had closed the airport, just to make things worse).
To satisfy an idle curiosity, I installed 
Many languages are spoken in more than one country, and many countries have more than one language. When you forget this you do stuff like language selection menus that use flags to represent languages. This is problematic for several reasons, starting with having to ask yourself what flag you are going to use to represent English, and how to deal with the angry letters you’ll receive when you use the national flag to represent a regional language. So, using flags to represent languages is definitely discouraged.
This said, have a look at this small piece of the 
The funny thing is that the flag you see next to Galician is the flag of Greenland. And Galician is not spoken at all in Greenland! So, what happened? Why did they use so wrong a flag?
The problem is that the ISO 639-1 code for the Galician language is gl , which is the same as the ISO 3166-1 code for Greenland. So, when choosing the flag for Galician they confused the language code with the country code and selected the flag for gl : that is, for Greenland.
(I’m surprised that they used the Ukrainian flag ( ua ) for the Ukrainian language ( uk ), and not the Union Flag. Perhaps that would have been too obvious an error :) – although I have been told by email that the ISO 3166-1 code for the UK is GB , not UK )
So, my takeaway message is: don’t use flags to represent languages and if you do, make sure you use a flag of a place where the language is actually spoken!
Addendum: I have just seen that Basque is accompanied by the flag of the European Union! That’s because the language’s code is eu . Ah, and there are three variants of the Chinese language (Hong-Kong, Simplified and Traditional), all with the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Someone is bound to receive angry email – Taiwan is a political hot potato. I have sent email to the maintainer of the page.