In two days time we are having a state election in Victoria (Australia). For this election there is only one party with policies that are positive towards free software, that is the Australian Greens. The policy documents include an IT policy (note that the IT policy is on a link that may change while the policy documents is a permanent link).

The Greens IT policy has three sections under the goals, one of those is about open standards (ensuring that government data is in documented file formats for use by all with no need to purchase software) and another is about Open Source which directly advocates the use of free software by government agencies. The principles part of the document is also very positive towards free software and explains why it's beneficial for Australia.

Any Greens representatives that are elected on the weekend have to abide by the party policy, that means that they must advocate the use of open standards and Open Source in government use and vote accordingly when any legislation related to computers is being considered!

Some of the members of the Greens are also members of the free software community, we were able to explain to the other party members the benefits for Australia and for social justice in the use of free software, and thus we reached an agreement about on a policy that suits people who use free software - not to benefit such people, but because of the benefits to society of the use of free software.

I think it would be good if members of the free software community in other countries would also join their local Green party and promote similar policies. While there is no direct connection between the Green parties in different countries the aims are very similar and therefore the arguments that persuaded Green members in Australia can be expected to work reasonably well in other countries (I am happy to provide advise in this regard via private mail if requested).

Also it would be good if other parties could be persuaded to have similar policies. If you want to help the free software community but for some reason you don't support the Greens then please join a party that matches your views and advocate an IT policy that promotes free software.

Currently people who want to vote for free software in the Victorian election have no option other than to vote for the Greens. As a member of the Greens I am happy to document this as a reason to vote Green. But as a member of the free software community I would like to see other parties adopt policies that promote free software.

The Greens adoption of a policy that promotes free software was largely driven by the issue of social justice. We believe that every Australian citizen has the right to access all public government data. If government data is available in proprietary formats then access is only granted to people who can afford the latest software ($800 for a full copy of MS Office) and hardware to run it ($600 at least). We believe that unemployed people who receive free Linux computers from Computerbank should be able to access government data. We also believe that when FOI laws apply in 30 years time all current data should be accessible, there's no chance that whatever version of Office is being sold in 30 years time will read current MS file formats, and there's no guarantee that MS will even be in business then. File formats for which there are authoritative open-source programs written to use them will be accessible in 30 years time and more.

Live CD on a removable disk Eros is a hardware guru that happened to be the unknown guy sitting next to me on a plane. He happens to be a happy Kubuntuer. While chatting, he told me one of his systems is an external hard drive made by copying a Kubuntu live CD image on it. Why did you do so? I asked. Because this way I can plug it in any computer, and it'll do hardware detection at boot. However it's a hard drive, so it's fast, and I can keep my home and all my customisations on it. I had never thought of it. That's an interesting and smart (ab)use of a live CD. Now I wonder: what would be required to plug the live CD boot time hardware detection infrastructure on an existing Debian or Ubuntu instalation? Update: slh on IRC suggests (a bit edited by me):

A lot of the former "obscure black magic" for live CDs isn't needed anymore. What is needed is: a kernel with static usb-storage, libusual, ehci-hcd, ohci-hcd, uhci-hdc (or an appropriate initrd/ initramfs). udev takes care of most h/w detection issues these days. As long as everything needed to boot is contained in a single partition you don't need a fstab: udev, hal and pmount take care of the rest, procfs, sysvfs, devpts, usbfs, shm are mounted by sysvinit. All what is left is a tool to create the xorg.conf while booting (those tools exist and just need to be called early). Everything else is just a matter of convenience: enhancing the live span of the USB key by changing data into tmpfs, etc.; if passwordless logins are required then xsession and inittab need to be changed; new ssh host keys generated on boot; small stuff. With ordinary flash storage, jffs2 and something to reduce write access is a good idea: perhaps unionfs for /var/ and /home/, bind mounting /tmp/ on /var/tmp/), but that's also not strictly necessary. Mostly it boils down to running the xorg-creation script at every boot time. There are various tools to do that. Some are here, but there is surely more. (Enrico's note: do we have anything in Debian that we can install and just does that?) Since USB and PS/2 mice share the same device since kernel 2.6, that part of xorg.conf doesn't strictly need to be detected, same for the keyboard (alps and synaptic touchpads can be easily detected) and X.org can use the screen's ddc info although it's not always reliable. It can boil down to just detecting the video chipset: something like this, that uses PCI IDs from discover1-data. It can also become a lot easier with X.org's own ddc detection, which almost boils down to configuring input devices and selecting the video driver. If I understand Daniel Stone correctly, X.org will soon improve its detection routines (fail safe X (auto-)configuration) as well in X.org 7.3. xresprobe is in debian: it's pretty similar to ddcxinfo-kanotix, both forked off RedHat's kudzu package - and all fail miserably on amd64. That's why ddcxinfo has a fallback to 1024*768 @75 Hz which "always works (+manual overrides)".

I need to get out of this place. Really, I do not mind a little bit of bureaucracy every now and then, but seriously, if someone asks you whether you have a minute, telling them that the proper way to do this is to look up your consultation hours on the Internet. Most of my experiences with this university are like this. The letter informing me of the tuition fees for next semester begins with "according to 17 of the Bavarian law concerning higher education in conjunction with 2 of the additional regulations on tuition fees, the university collects tuition fees of 500 Euros for the summer semester 2007.". Well, at least they go on promising that the money will be spent enhancing tuition. Honestly. Since this is the only uni in Munich I can attend and I'm not keen on being being cited regulations that prohibit me from taking advanced classes before I did the Java beginner course, I'm looking into other alternatives for getting a degree. Difficulty is that I'm pretty much bound to Munich. Any recommendations?

After registering children and alcohol drinkers, now they're going to fingerprint drivers at roadside checks, according to Motorists to give fingerprints [BBC News]. The report says

"Officers promise prints will not be kept on file"

but as Mark Wallace of civil liberties group the Freedom Association told them:

"I don't think we should be reassured by the fact that at the moment it's voluntary and at the moment they won't be recorded. Both of those things are actually only happening in the trial because the laws haven't been passed to do this on a national basis compulsorily and with recording."

ken lewis commented:

"My response to being asked for my fingerprints will be to say no and ask to prove my identity at the police station. That's non-violent resistance to this liberty-threatening move." "And that reminds me -- as a lurker on Planet Debian, I'm struck by the references to mailing-list flamewars. Why are people so keen on freedom able to discuss so violently that freedom?"

At the start of this week, one of the mailservers I run came heavily under attack. As well as the continuing surge in the sheer volume of spam - which has been reported widely in articles like Spam up by 59 per cent [Spannerworks Search Marketing News] - there were dozens of clients opening connections and then just sitting there idle. Very strange. To bring things back under control, I added a mixture of new anti-spam methods, but some things will always be attractive enough for bad people to attack manually and defeat whatever anti-spam you put in place. The only anti-spam which can't be defeated is one that will defeat all real people - and that helps spammers to pollute the network, IMO, making everyone else waste yet more time as a result of their spamming. My main anti-spam at the moment is a mix of:

• throttling and limit simultaneous connections - make them speak slowly and clearly;
• greylisting but be careful not to put the block time too high, else yahoo's mail relay farms will give up;
• tarpitting triggered by a DNSBL match - this is often enough to make spammers give up (too expensive) or violate the SMTP protocol;
• moderate list mails by Content-Type - most lists prefer text/plain;
• moderate by content string matching - rather fiddly to do this.

I always argue against doing a hard reject for a dnsbl match. In general, dnsbls are way too trigger-happy and too prone to false positives, especially for things like new mailservers coming online. Just this month, one of my ISP mailservers ended up in sbl-xbl and I couldn't find out why. Once I had added the extra anti-spam, the spam volume dropped significantly. Total message volume reduced by about 20%. I can't tell reliably how many of the 20% (or the remaining 80%) are spam, of course. But then the network connection failed, which may have been the cause of the idle connections that turned this into a crisis in the first place.

I'll be hacking on my hpodder program this weekend. hpodder is a full-featured podcast aggregator that runs on the command line, and has many features over other command-line podcatchers like bashpodder, and even over GUI tools like iPodder.

I originally envisioned hpodder to be something that I'd cron up and run in the background. But I have tended to run it in the foreground more than in the background. Some others have too, and the #1 requested hpodder feature is parallel downloads.

So I am working on that. I already have code working, in fact, that will parallelize both the hpodder update (downloading the feeds) and the hpodder download (downloading the actual episodes) commands.

Unlike ipodder, my code will make sure that no more than 1 thread will ever be downloading from a given server at a given time. ipodder had the terribly annoying habit of pointing all of its threads at a single server, thus pounding it while also providing little benefit for someone with a pipe fatter than the server's.

Before all this multithreaded stuff could be written, I needed to write my own status bar code instead of just letting curl display its own status bar. (That wouldn't work when there are 5 curls running at once)

I decided that I would write some generic status bar code, rather than something specific to hpodder. I took the apt-get status bar as an example, and whipped one up in Haskell and added it to my MissingH Haskell library.

But a status bar just begged for another feature: a generalized progress tracker. Something that could keep track of where a task (and its sub-tasks) are, calculate ETA, estimated time remaining, speed, etc. So I wrote that and made the status bar use it.

AND, a status bar begged for a generalized numeric formatter: something that could render 512 as 512, 2048 as 2K, 1048576 as 1M, etc. So I wrote that, and it's general enough that it can render into both SI and "binary" units by default (and others that users may want).

Finally, I wrote a function to take a number of seconds and render it in something friendly like 23m5s like apt uses, and shoved that in MissingH as well.

So now hpodder will have a status bar, and any other Haskell program can use the same status bar code in minutes because it's all generic. Or if someone just needs to render a number in megabytes, they can do that.

I really enjoy it when a program needs a solution that is generic enough to put in a larger library. I try to put as much of my Haskell code in MissingH as I can, so as to make it useful to others (and my other programs).

So it is hard to believe that in less than a month I will be somewhere, to be exact, Puerto Rico, that will be 80 degrees warmer than it is right now. And after weekend, it will be 100-105 degrees warmer. Yep, the cold (frikken) snap has arrived to Edmonton and it is preety intimidating. So long as there is no wind, it is tolerable but so long as there is some wind, it is unbearable. And I will park myself at home if that is the case. We were going to make a big trip to the mountains this weekend but with that type of weather, that may have been the end of me. And being that I think I am the only person in Edmonton from Puerto Rico…. that would be a shame. And speaking of the RICO… WikiTravel has chosen La Isla del Encanto as the spot for the Wiki Travel Get-Together. HAY Mamita y Papito, que HOT, as one would say… Evan Prodromou a.ka. MrBad, also a Debian developer, kick started the travelpedia and is going to be lucky enough to go. I am not sure if I can make it but I hearby promise to provide a detailed “map” of where the travelpedias should venture as I know the really good goods.. And they range from the Nuyorican cafe in El Viejo San Juan to hitting a couple of beaches on the amazing island of Culebra, going to Pinones Sunday night to listen to Rumba and anyway the list goes ON AND ON… I will be inspired while baking in 86 degrees (as opposed to freezing in-20 of Edmonton) and will provide le map.

For about five months now the Debian package of pbbuttonsd builds a package on i386, too, since it might actually be useful to have these available on MacBook (Pro) machines as well. What I don't know (since up until now I never actually used or even saw a MacBook with Linux installed) is whether any significant part of the functionality is working there or if it all depends on hardware that was specific to the PowerBooks and iBooks (e.g. PMU). I've decided that I will remove the i386 binary again before etch if nobody claims that it has proven useful too him. So if there are any users out there that would actually miss that package, please speak up now...

For about five months now the Debian package of pbbuttonsd builds a package on i386, too, since it might actually be useful to have these available on MacBook (Pro) machines as well. What I don't know (since up until now I never actually used or even saw a MacBook with Linux installed) is wether any significant part of the functionality is working there or if it all depends on hardware that was specific to the PowerBooks and iBooks (e.g. PMU). I've decided that I will remove the i386 binary again before etch if nobody claims that it has proven useful too him. So if there are any users out there that would actually miss that package, please speak up now...

Dear Lazyweb, What is the JSF 1.2 XML-Syntax equivalent for

<img src="<c:url value='/static/foo.png' />" />

(this will make the URL relative to your application root, not to your web server; so if the app is installed in /foobar, the resulting URL will be /foobar/static/foo.png) My preferred solution would have a useful src= value so an XHTML browser can still display the page. Same for CSS stylesheets, links and similar. Please send me an email at erich@debian.org, I'll update the entry. (Comments are intentially not enabled.) Thanks. [Update: at least in apache myfaces, this should work (untested):

<c:url value="/static/foo.png" var="url" />
<img src="$ url " />

However, the template file won't render approximately in a regular browser. For easy-to-edit templates it would be nice to have an actual value in the src property. I have an idea how that could work with custom tags...]

Introduction: This guide will walk you through the creation of an encrypted filesystem using LUKS. LUKS is the Linux Unified Key Setup and is a standard format for linux hard disk encryption. It has a lot of interesting features such as using a key on a removable disk, keeping multiple keys, and more. This is the technology used by the Debian Installer (since etch beta3) and is quickly becoming a standard in the linux world. Who this guide is for: This guide is for anyone who wants to secure their data using an encrypted partition. While it is tailored to users of Debian, it should apply elsewhere in the linux world. This guide is intended to add an encrypted device to an existing install, if you are contemplating a fresh install, the Debian Installer will configure encrypted filesystems for you. Ready? Then let’s begin Prepare the partition (or other block device) to be used This can be a partition on disk, a logical volume in LVM or some other block device. For this example, I created a 40 GB volume in LVM.

• For a physical partition, you would need to have an entire partition available on disk. Instructions for this can be found from many other sources
• For LVM, create a partition like this
  lvcreate -n crypto_test --size 40g asimov-vol

Install cryptsetup This utility provides an interface into the code in the linux kernel that handles encrypted block devices. It’s packaged for Debian in both testing and unstable, stable has an older version and I don’t know whether or not it will work in the same manner.
apt-get install cryptsetup Set up encryption on the partition: This initializes the partition for encryption and sets the initial key. People not using LVM will want a path like /dev/hdxY where hdxY is the partition on their hard drive that will be used for encryption. Important! This command will wipe out anything on that partition

cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test
WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/mapper/asimov–vol-crypto_test irrevocably. Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter LUKS passphrase:
Verify passphrase:
Command successful.

Congratulation! You now have an encrypted block device! However, it’s not quite ready to use. Open and map the device: This opens the device (prompting for a passphrase) and maps it to a block device in /dev/mapper. This can be used like any other block device, and the encryption/decryption is transparent. The first path (/dev/mapper/asimov–vol-crypto_test) is the encrypted partition you set up earlier. The name (crypto_test) is the name of the volume, the block device will be mapped as /dev/mapper/<name>.

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test crypto_test
Enter LUKS passphrase:
key slot 0 unlocked.
Command successful.

Create the filesystem of your choice on the device: This is just like setting up any other block device. I use ext3, others may prefer different formats.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/crypto-test Add the definition to /etc/crypttab: /etc/crypttab is a list of encrypted devices that are mapped on boot. The format is <map name> <path to device> <key file> <options> Since we’re using a passphrase, we don’t have a key file.
crypto_test /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test none luks Create a mount point: This is where the encrypted device will be mounted on your filesystem.
mkdir /mnt/crypto_test Add the device to /etc/fstab: /etc/fstab tells the computer where to mount different devices on the filesystem. The format is
<source path> <mount path> <type of filesystem> <options> <mount options options> <dump frequency> <fsck pass> More information can be found by reading man 5 fstab. You will want to add a line like this: /dev/mapper/crypto_test /mnt/crypto_test ext3 defaults 0 2 somewhere in this file. Update the initial ramdisk. The initial ramdisk is used to jumpstart the boot process and load modules for the kernel that it can’t load itself (such as drivers for block devices that contain the modules it uses). I’m not sure if this is needed or not, but I wanted to be on the safe side.
update-initramfs -u -k all Congratulations Now your encrypted filesystem is completely set up! Reboot the system and you will see it prompt you for your passphrase during the boot cycle. Once the password has entered, the encryption is completely transparent. If you want to use your encrypted filesystem before rebooting, simply type mount /path/to/mountpoint.

There has been a lot of interest recently in the VFX VoIP service launched by WorldXchange (WXC), no doubt partly driven by the fact that there is no monthly charge until April 2007. I had a spare Linksys PAP2T so I thought I would try the service out to see how it performed. The signup process didn’t go anywhere near as smoothly as it did when I signed up for my WXC DSL connection. The online signup form tried to force me to select a new WXC DSL Plan (I don’t want to do that, I want to keep my old plan with free National traffic). Despite trying several times and making sure that the only checkbox ticked was VFX each time, it refused to let me go any further. Giving up on the web form, I rang the WXC helpdesk who answered promptly. It is easy to see why WXC won the 2006 award for best call centre. Every time I deal with them over the phone it is a pleasant experience. This time was no exception. The CSR I was talking to explained that the webform was dying because I tried to use a VFX username that differed from my WXC DSL username. There was no mention of this restriction on the website! Anyway, 15 minutes later, with my MAC address taken down and my voice recording completed, I was told we were all done and that I would receive my welcome email and account details with 2 working days! 24 hours later I received the email with the details, followed promptly by a phone call from WXC CSR who was ready to talk me through the process of setting up my PAP2. Configuring the PAP2 was a simple procedure, I had to copy and paste a URL into the Provisioning Rule field of the web interface and reboot the device. It then downloads configuration information directly from WXC (based off the device MAC adddress) and configures itself. I was up and running with dial-tone about 2 minutes after receiving the email. Very smooth. I understand that the process is even easier if you purchase a pre-configured PAP2. The downside to the whole scheme is that in trying to make the process as simple as possible WXC has locked the entire system down very tightly and remove a lot of the flexibility that I would desire. In particular my PAP is now completely locked, I can’t access any of the web interfaces, and even the dial-in prompt on the PAP2 replies with a curt “cancelled” before hanging up. There is no way for me to configure the second line of the device to talk to a second SIP provider. Apparently WXC will create a custom configuration for me so that I can still use the second line, but I imagine this requires giving them all my account details for my second SIP provider, which I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing. It also appears that WXC has an arrangement with Linksys such that every PAP2 now sold in New Zealand comes pre-configured to be used with WXC. I haven’t had a chance to look at one of these PAP2s yet, but if it were to turn out that I had to contact WXC to remove the locking on my PAP2 before I was able to use it with another VoIP provider I would be fairly annoyed. The MyVFX portal is very underwhelming. It insists on opening itself in a new browser window, and isn’t integrated with the rest of the WXC/VFX website. From what I can make out it’s just a branded frontend on to the management system that WXC has purchased. The user interface is reminiscent of the design of the 1990s. I think there is a lot of potential for WXC to improve the experience in this area and I doubt that the average user would be comfortable updating settings via MyVFX in its present state. On the technical side of things the VFX service seems to be fairly well designed and secured. The devices are provisioned and configured using the Linksys/Sipura provisioning tools, which appear to encrypt all conversations with the device. The setup process downloaded two configuration files and a firmware file (v 3.1.10) to my PAP2. Both of the configuration files were binary and appear to be encrypted. Interestingly it appears that WXC downgraded the firmware from 5.1.1 to 3.1.1 during the provisioning process. The MyVFX portal and SIP server appear to be using some sort of BroadWorks device. The device fetches it’s configuration file from the WXC server every time it is powered on, so it will be easy for WXC to push out updates and configuration changes as they desire. The VoIP side of things is performed using SIP, which appears to be using standard HTTP Digest authentication. The username and passsword for this being hidden inside the encrypted configuration files which are downloaded to the device. The voice data uses the G.729 codec inside an RTP stream, and from a few short calls seems to be relatively good quality. Conclusion
Overall, VFX seems like a very easy to use and simple service. Simple being the keyword. By locking down the devices so securely and preventing people from using softphones and devices other than Linksys equipment I imagine many people like myself are excluded from the potential market. I can’t see myself keeping the service after I have to start paying money for it. But I would definitely recommend it to friends and family who are looking for a simple, easy to use VoIP system.

I skipped a week or two due to injury and lack of energy, but here are some more items for dwn. d-i etch RC1 was released, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel, easy setup of encrypted LVM, improved installation automation, and the return of installation floppies for i386, plus many other improvements and bug fixes. The improved NSLU2 support in this release in particular seems to be attacting a lot of attention. An RC2 with 2.6.18 is due soon. A release update was posted by Steve Langasek, it discusses an update of the timeline for release, calls for increased testing of etch, updates the release goals, and last but not least, unveils the codename for etch+1: lenny Changes are afoot to ftp-master.debian.org. While not yet officially announced anywhere, it's moved to a new, much more powerful server with terabytes of disk. Also, a new gpg key has been added that will be used to sign etch's release files for the lifetime of etch. Since this key isn't yet in the debian-archive-keyring package, there might be some minor issues when using apt, and debmirror is known to be broken by the unknown key. For now, the new key (6070D3A1) can be downloaded from subkeys.pgp.net. apt-zeroconf was announced by Franz Pletz. This is a decentralised apt cache that uses avahi to find other instances of itself on the LAN and share packages back and forth. Perhaps this will be useful at the next DebConf, which is now open for registration. The browser generally known as Firefox 2.0 has reached unstable as a new iceweasel package. Bug #354622 contains the sad backstory to this renaming.

As announced in August, HP has now gone live with support for ProLiant. More information is available at http://hp.com/go/debian. Admittedly its odd to announce sarge support right before etch releases, but hey - we had to start somewhere. On a similar topic, I started a wiki a while ago to track the status of sarge and etch on various ProLiant models. I think it'd be cool to have similar pages for various vendors. By linking to d-i installation reports, I hope this will reduce duplicate information.

This morning I came across Michael Berube’s response to Jodi Dean’s critique of Berube’s book What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education… It is a fascinating interchange worthy of a close read or two but without first-hand knowledge of the book, I hesitate to pledge my allegiance on either side. But I will hopefully to do so. The only thing that surprised me was that there was no mention of the grand master of the critique of liberalism, Stanely Fish… Not sure why but he seems like an obvious place to start. These ppst happened to really captured my attention this morening given I found them after reading the Chronicle of Higher Education piece Input or Intrusion? which examines the recent attacks against scholars deemed as “anti-Israel/pro-Palestine,” including against Nadia Abu El-Haj who happened to be on my dissertation committee… It will be very interesting to see how this all pans out and I am sure many of us are watching closely. And as an added bonus, here is a student’s thoughtful perspective on the Berube book.

Steve Langasek writes: … and while we don’t think we’ll be able to hit the Dec 4 deadline … It makes me feel sad. Lars will not get his tattoo: Everyone else is getting drunk, and it affects me. I make the silly bet about Debian releasing on time: if we do, I’ll get a Debian tattoo. Not to worry, I win either way.

(No, this is not security related. Some people call screensavers hacks . But I did get your attention, didn t I?) Whenever I happen to run gucharmap, I like to just browse and have a look at all those weird characters other people, especially asian, are using: A lot of them look really cool. So I thought: This would be a great screensaver.After some API digging I created that screensaver. It uses fontconfig to open the FreeSans and the DejaVu Sans fonts, selects a random glyph from these and display s it full screen. Below, the unicode code point and characer name are printed. After a few seconds, the next character is displayed nothing else, nothing hectic, quite relaxing.When you download the code, you will find a file uncode.c , which is the hack itself, a file unicode-names.h , which is taken from gucharmap and only slightly modified, as well as a buch of files from the xscreensaver distribution. To re-compile the binary, use the script compile , which runs gcc with flags I stole from the xscreensaver Makefile. I know this build system is everything but correct or sensible, but it works for me...Unfortunately I don t think it can be included in xscreensaver, as it depends on libfontconfig. If someone would rewrite it using only libX11, this might be possible, so if you like it, feel free to steal the idea.

Me wonders when Debian will reach to 400K.

Well, I finally got around to doing it -- I signed up for an i-name on 2idi. i-names are a universal identification format for the Internet -- kind of like OpenID, but a lot more centralized and a lot more authoritative. My i-name, for example, is =evan.prodromou -- a brief little string that doesn't really say that much. But you can make it an URI with an "xri:" prefix, and it can be resolved at http://xri.net/=evan.prodromou is the canonical link to my blog, and =evan.prodromou/(+work) is the canonical link to my work. I can change the forwarding when I change blogs (or work, or whatever). It's a neat system, and I guess it's pretty complimentary with OpenID. OpenID 2.0 will support i-names for login, although I'm not sure how well it works. I'm going to be upgrading Wikitravel to use the new OpenID libraries soon, so it'll be i-names capable... and I'll need a testing account, of course. tags: i-names openid identity

ikiwiki supports OpenID Ikiwiki is a wiki/blog/CMS engine by the unstoppable hacker Joey Hess. He just announced that he's made an OpenID plugin for ikiwiki. I think that's pretty cool. tags: ikiwiki joey hess openid plugin

Those 2.6.18-2 modules for legacy and non-legacy NVIDIA drivers have entered the NEW queue and hopefully etch once 2.6.18 does. I will upload 9742 to experimental shortly. Given the issues with NV2x and such (see nvnews.net for more) 8776 will be the drivers for etch. Once they hit testing, 9629 will enter unstable.