Search Results: "will"

1 September 2006

Matthew Garrett

04:02 <helix> burning man is for wankers
04:02 <mjg59> Yes
04:02 <mjg59> "HELLO I WILL SIT IN A DESERT AND MASTURBATE FURIOUSLY
PLEASE GIVE ME WATER IN RETURN"
04:02 <mjg59> It's like web 2.0 without the internet
04:03 <mjg59> And at the end everything catches fire and the investors
have nothing to show for it
04:03 <helix> haha
04:03 <helix> that is a great comparison
04:03 <mjg59> It's no wonder that the technology industry is obsessed
with it
04:03 <helix> well, jwz isn't
04:03 <helix> and he is our hero
04:03 <mjg59> jwz is post-web
04:03 <mjg59> Without being 2.0
04:04 <mjg59> Nightclub + webcams = good use of technology
04:04 <helix> word
04:04 <mjg59> Web 2.0 = BAD BAD BAD TECHNOLOGY BAD IN YOUR BED
04:04 <mjg59> NO BISCUIT
04:04 <helix> web 2.0 makes me want to die

Jesus Climent: No smoking policy.

Ever since my mother died I started smoking. Not much, not regularly. But as today, my 100000th birthday, I quit. No more nicotine for me. It will be hard, but I need to make it.

Erich Schubert: Busy with life

Today, I've been quite busy with "real life". First of all, I retrieved keys for my new room (see below), and was busy half of the day with packing stuff. Around noon, I had to go to a funeral. A friend of mine has died, most likely from cancer (maybe smoking-related, I don't know). He was very active for a NPO helping people with the internet. We'll really miss him there, too. In the afternoon I packed more of my stuff together, bought some new things; then took a break to go dancing - I started taking a Balboa class today - and finally took most of my stuff to my new room. Until around midnight I was cleaning the room, fighting the "malfunctioning" doors of the huge wardrobe and moving stuff in. Tomorrow I'll probably spend my first night in the new room.

This is a shot of the new room. I don't have a wide angle lense, so that is the best I could do (I have the lens on my Amazon Wishlist, but it's horribly expensive...). It's the plain room, nothing of my stuff in there yet. The first thing I did was putting up some nice yellow curtains, to add some color. The flash makes some funny light effects with the mirrors of the wardrobe on this picture. ;-) The room isn't huge, but it's well done. The bed fits in behind the door, a desk will fit next to the bed, and there is this huge wardrobe. The mirrors on it make the room appear larger and brighter. Now with some sunny colors this will be a room I can enjoy. I'll probably post another picture when I've added some more color to the room. I have a couple of nice computer artworks printed out to hang to the walls. Oh, and the linux sourcecode poster. ;-) (No, I probably won't put that one up. It's mostly gray. It wouldn't match the room. It will be interesting how my life will change the next months. I'll be doing a lot more dancing - I intend to join a Boogie sports club, learn Balboa and Boogie and train Lindy Hop - and since I'll be living closer to the city, I expect to go out more. And I hope the people I'll live with in that house are fun, so we'll be spending some time together. We have a pool table and a dart board in the living room, and a perfect spot for placing a projector. Also since I've passed my final exams, I'll now focus on my final thesis. My topic is about semantic wikis [wikipedia.org], at my university and a research institute. The last months, I had been rather bored with university life; the thesis will likely set the course for the next few years of my life: research, entrepreneurship or just working at some larger company.

31 August 2006

Joey Hess: kite: wew

Kite crashed. Don't know exactly why (though the kern.log has some strange and scary messages about USB controllers being halted and restarted); the friendly console monkeys got it back up without much fuss, although by that point I was restoring the latest backup and preparing to switch everything over to wren. Which would have been pretty ugly, with 12 hours of mail lost and stuff, so thank goodness that didn't happen. I've put off finishing the move to wren for too long, but it will still wait until after my trip.

Lucas Nussbaum: Automatically watching for updates on web pages ?

Once in a while, I come upon a web page that :

Doesn’t offer an RSS/Atom feed.
Doesn’t change very often.
I would like to be warned when it’s updated.

I would like to be automatically warned when such pages change. websec does this :

Description: Web Secretary - Web page monitoring software
A visual Web page monitoring software. However, it goes
beyond the normal functionalities offered by such software. Not only
does it detect changes based on content analysis (instead of date/time
stamp or simple textual comparison), it will email the changed page to
you with the new content highlighted.

But :

It sends emails. Generating an RSS feed would be much better.
It sends HTML emails. OK, you can use AsciiMarker to view the changes with a text MUA, but still…

Anybody knows of another piece of software I could use ?

Russell Coker: first significant project goes live

One advantage of not being a permanent employee is that I am free to do paid work for other people. This not only gives a greater income but also a wider scope of work. I've just completed my first significant project since leaving Red Hat. The <a href="http://www.inumbers.com/">Inumbers</a> project provides an email address for every mobile phone. If you know someone's mobile phone number but don't have an email address then you can send email to NNN@inumbers.com where NNN is the international format mobile phone number. The recipient will receive an SMS advising them how to sign up and collect the email. It was fun work, I had to learn how to implement SRS (which I had been meaning to do for a few years), write scripts to interface with a bulk SMS service, and do a few other things that were new to me.

Clint Adams: Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the moviefone

A couple of arrogant fucks once boasted to me of the coed naked T-shirts which they had commissioned for their special hobby (which is far too embarrassing for me to mention even though I do not participate in it). The gist of it was that they were mocking the stupidity of the people who wear coed naked shirts by... wearing them ironically. I tried to explain to the intelligent one of the pair that she wasn't actually mocking the people who wear coed naked shirts because it just so happened that, by virtue of the fact that she had purchased and donned a coed naked shirt of her own design, she had become one of the people who wears coed naked shirts. She didn't seem to comprehend my point. So when I sally forth into the following paragraph, in mockery of bloggers who refer to people by initial, you may wonder whether I am mocking the people who use initials or if I have just become one of those people. For example, both K. and K. are getting married this year, and they're both getting married to men named J. Is that creepy? In contrast, K., who only dates men named J. (which is definitely creepy), is not getting married this year, but you don't need to get married when you're in Europe. Get it? Okay, here we go. Y. calls me up and says, Clint, do you want to go to the opera tonight? Two questions later, I say, Sure. Is there any pre-opera dinner action? I have dinner plans, she replies haughtily, T. was interested in dinner though. Call C . about it. Don't invite C .! I had no intention of inviting either C . or C ., but I called C . C . didn't answer, so I constructed a voodoo doll and stabbed it. After some time, circumstances changed a bit, and in order to accommodate reality a bit, Y. cancelled her dinner plans, and we arranged a meeting place with T. and C . and E. Since none of us were going to end up having time for dinner, Y. said that she'd bring finger sandwiches . There was some discussion of buying wine to go with the finger sandwiches , which I thought was a little silly, and the conclusion was a bunch of vague non-committal grunts. I was surprised when three bottles of wine showed up. I was surprised by the enormity of the finger sandwiches . I was surprised to see M. at our meeting spot. Then M. got a phone call and proceeded to announce that A. was en route. There was some quibbling over whether we should all wait for A. or whether M. should wait while the rest of us got our seats. We concluded that the latter was the sanest option. I opted to wolf down one of the foot-long finger sandwiches and a healthy amount of whichever wine got opened first. A. shows up with a large bag of food. She explains that she had gone shopping at Whole Foods, and as she is still drunk from the margaritas she had started drinking at lunchtime, she had bought a bit too much food. At this point, there is no indication of her drunkenness, though she has bought numerous cheeses, loaves of bread, candies, a giant low-fat or fat-free cake-like abomination, cookies, a several-pound chunk of chocolate, and a sizeable bottle of Orangina. She drinks the Orangina as not to get any drunker, and I cringe in terror as a boor gets on stage and screams about how the fatcats in Washington are trying to purge the Earth of the performing arts and how we've all got to take action to fight that. I consider writing to my elected representatives in the Federal government, but only because the guy on stage is one of them. A. switches from Orangina to wine at M.'s coaxing. Some asshat in front of us starts waving the flag of another country for no reason we can discern. Y. starts hissing about how she needs someone to fetch her a shotgun. It takes far too long for anyone to forcibly stop the flag waver, but it happens eventually. No shotguns were involved. Now, among those not in the know, there are often rumors that A. and I have a thing going. This is because I call her fat and threaten to do possibly-unpleasant things to her breasts, and in return she calls me things I won't mention and threatens to do non-breast-related things to me, and makes obscure Lloyd Alexander references that only I understand. Those in the know, on the other hand, are aware that she cheated on her husband with M., and are somewhat irritated by this because apparently her husband is a really nice guy. I've never been allowed to meet him, so I've no idea. Anyway, we start misbehaving. E. managed to maintain decorum the entire time, but M. and A. started fondling each other and kissing and giggling, and C . started SMSing comments about how these people can't behave themselves, and T. is on IRC complaining about how people are misbehaving. A. grabbed at my cell phone in protest of our rude electronic communication, so I slapped the hell out of her. Do you want me to beat him up? M. inquired from A.'s lap. Being possessive and protective of girls with whom you wish to copulate is apparently a rather popular pastime in the white trash community, because C . had threatened to beat me up on A.'s behalf not two days before. Anyway, to her credit, she said, No, I deserved it. To show my admiration, I beaned her with a wine cork. C . had some hand sanitizer, which we entertained ourselves with while arguing about which opera La donna mobile is from. I wish the consensus had been West Side Story, but the majority opinion was for La boh me. I'll assume that the had something to do with the confusion. Against all odds, they managed to finish the opera despite us and the other miscreants, and we proceeded to leave. On the way out, M. and A. had an utterly inane discussion which would have been utterly forgettable had they not ended each sentence by calling each other baby . Thenceforth, I have addressed them both as baby , which makes them very embarrassed and quiet. Clint, A. whined, Give me your job. You're drunk, I countered. But I'm cute! A. insisted. Oh, I see. You're REALLY drunk, I observed. Meh, she mumbled, no longer on her sluttiness high. Men are dumb. M. declared that I must absolutely go see some museum exhibit I'm sure I don't care about, and A. said, No! We're going to see that! Yes, we are, M. agreed. Okay, baby, I said patronizingly, then went home with T.

30 August 2006

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Wikipedia News

Wikipedia has been in the news a lot lately. Some of the articles are quite insightful:

Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? in the July 31 New Yorker.
The Hive in the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly

Each article examines a different aspect of Wikipedia knowledge and culture, and they fit together nicely (although presumably unintentionally). Both articles are proof that traditional print media can still be relevant and coexist semi-peacefully with peer production efforts like Wikipedia. They are also excellent examples of something other than a knee-jerk defensive reaction by incumbent media to a perceived threat (e.g., this FOX news story or Britannica’s response to Nature’s article comparing Wikipedia to Brittanica). Meanwhile, an interesting unrelated Wikipedia commentary in the blogosphere:

Seven Wikipedia Fallacies by enfant terrible James Grimmelmann. It’s nice to see James blogging more, now that his judicial clerkship is over. (Is he still an enfant terrible now that he has finished his clerkship? Only time will tell.)

Andree Leidenfrost: Cheap Thrills (mondo 2.09-2)

I've just uploaded mondo 2.09-2 which comes with a number of improvements and bug fixes (one reported and more unreported):

No more garbled screens or error messages because of insufficiently escaped strings used in system() or popen(). (Well, not quite true, but the one known issue should be fixed now with new function module mr_stresc() that can be used wherever else needed.)
mondorestore will now ask in non-nuke mode whether an existing post-nuke script is to be executed. (Doing this is generally a good idea on Debian as the post-nuke script in the package updates the initrd image to adjust for RAID and other system changes.)
Fixed issue where stabgrub-me would fail if /etc/grub.conf is a symbolic link preventing the user from editing the grub config file. (This requires readlink which I've added to mindi-busybox, hence the new mindi-busybox package version.)
I was getting segmentation faults in space_occupied_by_cd() - it's not a good idea to do fin = popen(...) followed by fgets(...,...,fin) without checking the success of the former. Fixed this by evaluating errno after the popen() call. (Strangely, with the errno checking in place, popen() doesn't seem to fail anymore, which might indicate a different underlying issue althogether - we'll see.)

Whilst working on the above I also experienced problems with ntfsclone and the still very present NFS issue with kernel 2.6.17.
.

Because of bespoke NFS issue I tested with DVDs as backup media on amd64 with kernel 2.6.17-2-amd64 (2.6.17-7).

Martin F. Krafft: Using LVM snapshots for filesystem recovery

This morning, I found myself in Gunnar's position and was looking at an empty /home directory because of the following mount failure:

piper:~# mount /dev/mapper/vg0-home
mount: Unknown error 990
Starting XFS recovery on filesystem: dm-0 (logdev: internal)
Filesystem "dm-0": xfs_inode_recover: Bad inode magic number, dino ptr =
  0xffff810028a6bd00, dino bp = 0xffff81002851d140, ino = 33629
Filesystem "dm-0": XFS internal error xlog_recover_do_inode_trans(1) at
  line 2352 of file fs/xfs/xfs_log_recover.c.  Caller 0xffffffff88307729

I am used to XFS giving me hard times, but this time at least I didn't have much to worry as it happened at home, I have plenty other machines I can use instead, and all data was backed up. Since this is on a Debian unstable machine, I had the latest xfs_repair available, and told it to do its thing, but it refused:

piper:~# xfs_repair /dev/mapper/vg0-home
Phase 1 - find and verify superblock...
Phase 2 - using internal log
        - zero log...
ERROR: The filesystem has valuable metadata changes in a log which needs to
be replayed.  Mount the filesystem to replay the log, and unmount it before
re-running xfs_repair.  If you are unable to mount the filesystem, then use
the -L option to destroy the log and attempt a repair.
Note that destroying the log may cause corruption -- please attempt a mount
of the filesystem before doing this.

Great. Catch-22. I decided to have a go at fixing it, but as much as I pretended to grok xfs_db, I did not manage to get the filesystem into a consistent state. I thus fired off an email to the mailing list (which has not arrived there 4 hours later) and started pv to dump the raw data to another machine for later use or debugging. Watching the progress meter of pv from time to time, it occured to me that my /home is in fact on LVM. I put it on LVM way back when LVM was new and cool and I wanted to gather experience with it. I've never actually done anything with it, but today it saved my little bits of remaining sanity. Why? Because LVM can take snapshots of volumes. It took me a while to put the pieces together, but in the end, a snapshot would enable me at least to run a test-round of xfs_repair -L and assess the damage, and if it wasn't all that bad, I could just run the repair process on the actual volume again. With the encouragement and knowledge of Christian Aichinger and Daniel J. Priem on IRC, I hence proceeded to give it a try. First I had to extend the volume group to make room for the snapshot data, and since I had no disks handy, I just used a loop device based on a sparse file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/srv/loop bs=1 count=1 seek=5368709120
losetup -f /srv/loop
pvcreate /dev/loop0
vgextend vg0 /dev/loop0
lvcreate -s -n home-snapshot /dev/vg0/home -L 5G

(Thanks to Ian Nicholls for spotting the error: I was using pvcreate instead of that last lvcreate previously). Now /dev/vg0/home-snapshot was a copy-on-write snapshot of the original volume, and I could do whatever I wanted with it, as long as I did not exceed the 5G size allotted for the copied data blocks that I modified. Using mount and xfs_repair, I could verify that the problem also shows up with the snapshot. Thus, I ran xfs_repair -L on the snapshot and finally was able to mount the snapshot to inspect the /lost+found directory. Fortunately, it wasn't all that full, nor was there anything important in there, so I sighed, removed the snapshot (lvremove) and unleashed xfs_repair -L on the original volume, which is now again mounted under /home. Finally, remove the loop device from the volume group (vgreduce). If you are like me and forgot to do so before rebooting and now find your LVM volumes not starting anymore, look into the --removemissing option. I like this method. I knew the filesystem was corrupted, but I did not know to what extend. Had corruption been worse, I could have waited for the XFS guys to help me out. But seeing the low damage, I was able to decide to just purge the journal and accept the damage. If this had happened on a more important machine (i.e. without recent backups), I would have proceeded a bit differently: once the snapshot was mounted, I'd have run xfs_dump on it to save the data. I would also have used more space for the snapshot and not removed it until the parent volume was repaired and mounted. It's unlikely that xfs_repair will produce different results when run on a volume and its snapshot, but better be safe than sorry. All this said, I just want to point out that the above method is filesystem independent and hence would work for any filesystem out there. I've never been a big fan of LVM, especially without RAID to build on (striping across physical media multiplies your chance of data loss), but this method is a good reason for using LVM regardless: use a volume group instead of your physical disk, and logical volumes instead of partitions, but don't span disks (unless you have to). Then, if stuff goes bad, you can hook in another disk, extend the volume group with it, and work on snapshots.

Russell Coker: SRS development

I've been working on a mail forwarding system which required me to implement <a href="http://www.openspf.org/srs.html">SRS</a> to allow people who use <a href="http://www.openspf.org/">SPF</a> to be customers of the service (as I use SPF on my domain it's fairly important to me). Reading the web pages before actually trying to implement it things seemed quite easy. All over the web you will see instructions to just set up an /etc/aliases file that pipes mail through the srs utility. The problem is that none of the srs utility programs actually support piped mail. It seems that the early design idea was to support piped mail but no-one actually implemented it that way. So you can call the srs utility to discover what the munged (cryptographically secure hash signed) originator of the email should be but you have to do the actual email via something else. This wasn't so much of a problem for me as I use my own custom maildrop agent to forward the mail instead of using /etc/aliases (Postfix doesn't support what I want to do with /etc/aliases - dynamically changing the email routing as you receive it isn't something that Postfix handles internally). However I still have one problem. Sometimes I get two or three copies of the SPF header from Postfix when it checks them. In my main.cf file I have a smtpd_recipient_restrictions configuration directive that contains check_policy_service unix:private/spfpolicy and the Postfix master.cf file has the following: <pre> spfpolicy unix - n n - - spawn user=USER argv=/PATH/spf-policy.pl </pre> Does anyone have any ideas why I would get multiple SPF checks and therefore multiple email header lines such as: <pre> Received-SPF: none (smtp.sws.net.au: domain of SRS0=MUyCQ6=CO=coker.com.au=russell@inumbers.com does not designate permitted sender hosts) Received-SPF: none (smtp.sws.net.au: domain of SRS0=MUyCQ6=CO=coker.com.au=russell@inumbers.com does not designate permitted sender hosts) [some other headers] Received-SPF: pass (inumbers: domain of russell@coker.com.au designates 61.95.69.6 as permitted sender) Received-SPF: pass (inumbers: domain of russell@coker.com.au designates 61.95.69.6 as permitted sender) Received-SPF: pass (inumbers: domain of russell@coker.com.au designates 61.95.69.6 as permitted sender) </pre> The email went through one mail router and then hit the destination machine, but somehow got 5 SPF checks along the way. Also the pair of identical checks had no lined between them and the set of three identical checks also had no lines between them. So multiple checks were performed without any forwarding. It seems that a single port 25 connection is giving two or three checks. Both machines run Postfix with SPF checking that is essentially idential (apart from being slightly different versions, Debian/unstable and RHEL4). Any advice on how to fix this would be appreciated.

Lars Wirzenius: Debian Inquirer: A Royal Mess: Debian Fights Queen

Queen Elizabeth II and the Debian project threaten religious warfare! D-Inq has today uncovered a conflict between the Debian Project and the queen of England and other places. The row is over the King James Version of the Bible. "It's all mine! Mine! Mine!" the monarch told D-Inq in an exclusive interview. "Keep yer dirty fingers off it or I'll sick the SAS on you." In the UK, the monarch owns the copyright for the KJV Bible, but the Debian project wishes to distribute it freely. The SAS, UK's elite fighting force and the Queen's personal mob, is already gearing up. Instead of their usual arsenal of guns and bombs, they're opting to use a new kind of weapon, the DD Attitude Readjustment Tool, or DART. The Debian Project is undaunted. "We've seen worse, this is a pedestrian transport in a big grassy place in comparison" says a Debian flame war veteran, Steve, 22, from Portland, Oregon. "The SAS is nothing compared to a vigorous discussion about firmware freeness. It's not even as bad as someone spoiling the next episode of B5." Things might get more difficult, though. There are rumors that MI5 has already infiltrated Debian's discussion forums. Worried analysts imply that some of the recent, divisive developments within the project are the result of agent provocateurs. "The new Python policy is one", says Lars W, an analyst who wishes to remain nameless. "No sensible person would have done things like that", he continues. While both sides ramp up their fighting forces, local constabulary in many English towns has already started to confiscate and deport machines running Debian to Libya. Time will tell when they will return.

Felipe Augusto van de Wiel: 29 Aug 2006

To infinity, and beyond! -- Buzz

[Debian]

I should write about this a few days ago but didn't have the time. Sorry. Well, these are great news (at least for me), a few days ago I sent the second part of my T&S and already got approved. My AM (Hi Cl ment) also pointed out a few changes that were needed in my packages that are already fixed and uploaded; Cl ment already sent the report and considering that, I'm now waiting for the Front Desk to review my application (and after that, DAMnation. I'm happy! I also finish the adoption of xless and levee. I still have to finish the MyPasswordSafe adoption, but before I have to fix a RC bug related to the use of sudo as the gain-root command (instead of fakeroot) in the alpha buildd. Thanks neuro that already give me a few tips on how to solve it.

Following the random ideas season:

Next week, Extremadura will host the i18n Debian people, the idea is to discuss lots of ideas, specially i18n Infrastructure, but not only discuss, also code a lot!
I do not like the idea to have sourceless firmware in main and I really like Don Armstrong proposal on that subject.
I still have to finish the desproxy, tuxfrw and thumbs packaging work to get it in time for etch.
I'm wondering how a tally sheet with more than 10 choices looks like

[Anti-SPAM season]

Like a lot of people already did, in the last two weeks I've been fighting SPAM in my company and also on the server of Free Software Projects that I'm part of the System Administration Team. In most cases I'm using postfix with clamscan and postgrey, but I will switch to amavisd-new to use SpamAssassin (with razor/pyzor). But I'm still studying the various alternatives in a Debian Sarge system.

Hey silva, thank you! (Journeyer certification).

Adeodato Sim : A sweet first, today

I’ve enjoyed tears of joy many times in my life, always triggered by the happyness of my loved ones. Today, they were for me, my tears. I have noone to thank for these past three days, but life itself. I don’t know how long this will last, either, but I am not scared. NR: Miguel Delibes, Pegar la hebra. (As Joaqu n Sabina would put it, “this is what I wear a hat for.”)

Uwe Hermann: LinuxBIOS Symposium 2006 Europe

For everybody who might be interested in this kind of stuff: the LinuxBIOS project's annual LinuxBIOS Symposium will take place October 1st-3rd, 2006 in the nice German city Hamburg. In the light of the recent discussions about "sourceless firmware" and similar issues in Debian, some people might be interesting in helping with (or at least getting informed about) a practical project related to this - a free (GPL'd) BIOS replacement. It's quite likely that some OLPC people will be there, too, as the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project employs LinuxBIOS on their hardware... Deadline for workshop and talk proposals is September 10th (if you should plan to give a talk), and a preliminary agenda is already available online. The registration process has also recently started (deadline is September 11th). See this post for the full announcement. Now, if I manage to somehow gather a reasonably large amount of Euros, I'll probably be there.

Joey Hess: id fraud

I found out today that someone found the small amount of information about me they needed to nearly successfully buy stuff in my name. They call this "identity theft", but since my identity still seems to be intect (pats his rampant ego) and since as an ardent SF fan, I'd like to reserve the term identity theft for the possibility of someone stealing a copy of me, I prefer not to use that term for this form of fraud. Luckily I already had a fraud alert placed on my accounts before this happened; I started placing these alerts a while ago, on the basis that the banking system's verification methods are so broken that it makes sense to just do it pre-emptively, before you have any reason to think someone is trying to defraud you. Who knows if that does any good though. Oddly, I almost ranted about this id theft nonsense last week, before I knew this happened. The thing is, while I'm calling to report credit cards as compromised and learning that someone managed to put together my name, address, phone number, and a not very well secured credit card number; at the same time I have something here with these properties:

Anyone can use it to verify if a given statement (such as "transaction #128: please pay this person $500") was actually made by me and actually applies to the person I meant it to.
Using it doesn't automatically give it to a supposedly trusted third party, such as the low-paid phone support guy who has my credit card number and all the rest up on his screen right now as I ask him to cancel the purchase.
According to the experts is not breakable by any means except for a brute-force attack that would use the resources of a medium-sized country.
Can be used to identify me with a fair degree of certainty, even if you've not met me.
Is suitable for use on the internet.
Even if physically stolen from me is not trivially easy to break and use.
If I lose it or know that someone has stolen it from me, I can revoke its use in a way that is just as hard to forge or break.
Can, incidentially, be used to make private conversations just as hard to snoop on. But that's probably a different rant.

That magic thing is a public and private key pair for GPG, and it seems really weird to me that I can use this for unimportant things like signing email, and for crucial things like authenticating changes to the software deployed on millions of coumputers, but I cannot use it to pay a bill. I wonder if the world at large will ever catch on to the uses of public key cryptography? Anyone want to start a First Bank of GPG?

29 August 2006

Joachim Breitner: Free Software Club continues

Today was the second meeting. At the first meeting, I introduced a wiki and a blog, but so far they have not been using it a lot. To change that, I will now reward "Geek points" for contributions in the wiki, and on the blog, as well as for other challenges. The topics today were how software is created (quick overview of the priciple of compilation, and mentioning of the need for documentation etc.), and then I continued with Free Software: What's wrong with proprietary software, and why Free Software is better.I think they got the message, but are not fully convinced yet. It seems that they found my "Hello World" demonstration in Python, Perl, C and Haskell more interesting, and my offer to do a little programming course in the club was well received.A bit worrying are the questions "Can you hack into this sytem?", "Do you know how to hack through a firewall?" Of course I can't just say "no" (it would be discouraging) or "yes" (then they would want me to show how, which I don't want do do yet). I tried to explain then that to be able to "hack through a firewall", you first need to understand what a firewall is (Knowing that it is something that blocks unauthorized access from the outside is not enough), and then how it works in the details. Basically I tried to tell them that knowledge comes before any hacking (or cracking).You can have a look at the slides, comments are of course welcome!

David Welton: Preliminary MIDP2.0 Support for Hecl

Wolfgang added preliminary support for MIDP2.0 to Hecl this afternoon. It's exciting news, because it's a big chunk of very useful code - MIDP2.0 is what most fancier phones have - in other words, it's what other geeks are running. Hopefully this will increase Hecl's appeal to that crowd. Naturally, the code was just checked in, so it's probably only suitable for those willing to hack on it and get involved right now, but hopefully we will cut a new release that includes it "soonish", depending on the amount of free time I have. Thanks!

Ross Burton: Epiphany Requested

I'm trying to write an extension in Python for Epiphany that has a toolbar button, and let the user add/remove it at will. Now, I can add a button, but I can't get it to appear in the editor. This is probably due to me being silly and not understanding how the editable toolbar works... I have already created an action for my extension, which is called "Post". If I do this:

shell = epiphany.ephy_shell_get_default()
shell.get_toolbars_model().add_item(0, 0, "Post")

Then the button appears on the toolbar, and works. I can even remove it from the toolbar with the editor, but if I do this I can't add it back again. Does anyone understand how to add a toolbar and menu item (for the same action) to Epiphany from a Python extension?

Erich Schubert: Bashisms are everywhere.

/etc/init.d/cryptmount: 16: source: not found
/etc/init.d/cryptmount: 19: Syntax error: "(" unexpected

Another bashism. Policy violation in section 10.4. Severity "serious", but trival to fix. I thought we had managed to get rid of all unnecessary bashisms. Any Debian Developer should use e.g. dash as /bin/sh to avoid these bugs. It's faster, and bugs triggered by that are rare. Speaking of cryptmount: Dear Lazyweb, how do I get pmount/gnome ask for the luks passphrase using a graphical prompt? Right now, if Gnome tries to automount the encrypted drive, the password will be asked on some /dev/null device and pmount will hang.

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