After a long time of testing and just plain other non-software writing stuff, I'm happy to announce Gjay 0.3.0 is released. This is my first release of Chuck Groom's code and hopefully it will work for you too.

The Debian packages will be out shortly after some building and testing. If you have a 64-bit computer it now works with 64 bits fine (ie on my amd64).

It still needs some work, I'd like it to interact with more than audacious as the sound player. Also if you know how to in one of the sound libraries stream wav, ogg or mp3 files correctly I'd like to hear from you. Currently gjay just uses the same old fork to mpg321 method, but idealy I'd like it to use the libraries directly.

For the first time since I got involved in Ruby maintenance in Debian & Ubuntu, we are seriously at risk of not being able to release working Ruby interpreters in both Ubuntu Lucid and Debian Squeeze, because of two pretty serious issues. Ruby 1.8(.7.249) randomly hangs with eglibc 2.11 That issue was found by Google folks, because Puppet was hanging. After a lot of (quite heated) discussion, it was found that the problem is caused by something in eglibc 2.11: the problem can t be reproduced in a Debian unstable chroot (with eglibc 2.10), but is reproducible if you just upgrade glibc to 2.11 (which is in Debian experimental). It is not clear at all whether it is a glibc bug, or a ruby bug: Ruby has shown in the past that it was making some assumptions on the behaviour of pthread. It is possible that a valid change in glibc conflicts with an assumption made by Ruby. Still, I wonder why Ubuntu chose to release with eglibc 2.11, while Debian still only has 2.10 in unstable, and Ubuntu doesn t really have a lot of people with deep glibc knowledge. (Update: I assumed we would release squeeze with 2.10, but the eglibc maintainers plan to release 2.11 in squeeze.) That issue is tracked in Launchpad as bug 520715 (which was reassigned to eglibc), and in Ruby s redmine as bug 2739. Debian Squeeze isn t affected by that issue, but we are likely to get bitten as well after Squeeze if a solution isn t found by then. As Ruby maintainers in Debian/Ubuntu, we can t do much about this issue, because it requires either a lot of glibc knowledge, or a lot of understanding of the Ruby threading code. Ruby 1.9(.1.37 6,8 ) s test suite hangs on Sparc The development branch of Ruby (declared stable by the interpreter developers, but not considered as such by the third-party libraries developers) also has interesting issues. Its test suite hangs on sparc, but only (apparently) on specific CPUs/kernel versions. Here again, it is not clear whether it is a Ruby issue, or a kernel issue, for the same reasons as above. It is also possible that it is fixed in Linux 2.6.32, but the Debian build daemons run the lenny kernel, so we can t check that. This is tracked as Debian bug 565765, and is not tracked in Ruby s redmine, because Sparc is not supported by the upstream Ruby developers. This issue really requires Sparc knowledge (and access), so as Ruby maintainers, again, we can t do much, besides coordinating and poking the various people that can help.

I've decided to take part in the 2010 Seven Day Roguelike Challenge My entry will be written in JavaScript as a KDE4 plasmoid (thus simultaneously allowing me to take part in this competition) Unfortunately today had to be spent in RL family activities so I'm already behind. however I've done lots of research into Roguelike development and I have accomplished the first step finding a name. Candidates are:

• Descent into the No-No Area
• Going Rogue
• Battle For Quiznosth
• Tol-in-Gaurhoth

...and the winner is:

• A Lively Fisting

It will be a simple combat heavy coffeebreak game inspired by things such as Solo Dungeon Bash and Pocket Dungeon though as time permits I will add as many more roguelike features as I can.

I finally got a few hours free this morning to check an item off my home system administration checklist: upgrading the wireless router's firmware to OpenWRT. There were a couple motivations for this, including the fact that my SoundBridge Radio couldn't maintain a connection to my firefly server using the built-in firmware, and I had read that OpenWRT would work better. Since this is posted on Planet Debian, I should mention why I didn't use DebianWRT. The basic answer is this text at the top of the DebianWRT homepage:

Currently the most common methods used to run Debian on these systems is to install OpenWRT or a similar firmware, add disk space either by USB storage or NFS, create a debian chroot by either running cdebootstrap from inside OpenWRT or debootstrap --foreign on a PC, and running Debian from this chroot. For example, instructions for the WLHDD.

I'm not sure whether this is because DebianWRT is experimental, or because its goal is to use routers as cheap general computers. Either way, it sounds way too complicated and/or fragile for what I'm interested in (i.e., a wireless router with better software). The goal here is to get something that does a better job than the built-in WRT firmware, but doesn't require too much tinkering to get working or to maintain. I have plenty of outlets for my tinkering urges already. Nothing here was exactly difficult, but it was hard to find all the information I needed to get things working. Hopefully documenting the steps I went through here will save someone else some time. Step 1: acquire the firmware This was trickier than you might think. If you click on the download link at the OpenWRT web site, you end up at the top of an FTP server populated with a vast quantity of stuff. Worse, when you find the actual firmware images, you'll quickly discover that there are piles and piles of them divided between sixteen directories, and no guidance as to which one to pick. And picking the wrong one will turn your beautiful router into a doorstop. Luckily, the OpenWRT documentation contains a section called "Getting Started". Unluckily, that section consists of the following text:

1.1 Getting started 1.1.1 Installation 1.1.2 Initial configuration 1.1.3 Failsafe mode

Whoops, someone forgot to execute on a TODO. Undeterred, I consulted the usual fallback reference, Google. It pointed me at several references, some of which were hidden on other parts of the OpenWRT site. Armed with these, I was able to determine that:

1. My WRT54GL v1.1 probably uses a Broadcom 5352 chipset.
2. The correct firmware, according to multiple sources, is probably in the kamikaze top-level director, the latest version's subdirectory, and the bcrm-2.4 directory under the version (the link is to 8.09.2, which is current as of March 6, 2010). Apparently the bcrm47xx directory doesn't have wireless support; it helpfully contains a file called NO-BROADCOM-WIRELESS to warn you off, but unhelpfully doesn't include any additional information in that file (like what exactly is broken or that you can find a working firmware in a sibling directory) ... oh well.
3. The firmware file that you want is openwrt-wrt54g-squashfs.bin, even though it doesn't match the model number of the router. This directory could use a README file explaining which hardware is supported by each of the dozen or so firmware files it contains.

Step 2: install the firmware After Step 1, this was a real relief. I just used the built-in Linksys firmware installer, pointed it at the .bin file, and it went. Step 3: configure the router The installation guide I followed was pretty much silent about what to do after I got the firmware on. Luckily, this is just a software problem, meaning it's much more familiar territory for me.

1. First things first: I checked that I could still get a DHCP lease. It worked.
2. Armed with that, I tried telneting to the router. I used the resulting root prompt to set a password on the root account.
3. I logged out and tried telneting in. Apparently the router is configured to disallow root logins over telnet if you don't have a password. Good for them (although why allow telnet at all?); oops for me.
4. Luckily, an ssh server was installed by default. I like using keys to log in, so I tracked down the documentation on configuring the server to use public-key authentication; it turns out there's a single global key file named /etc/dropbear/authorized_keys that's exactly like OpenSSH's per-user authorized_keys file. No idea what would happen if I had multiple users, but I won't.
5. The next obstacle: I didn't have an Internet connection. For some reason, my cable modem didn't want to give the router a DHCP lease. On the off-chance that it was remembering too much, I rebooted it and ran ifup wan. That fixed the problem. I still don't know why.
6. Not a step, but a useful note: in the process of figuring the above out, I found readlog. It's basically dmesg for syslog files; it shows the most recent lines written to syslog. This is useful because there isn't a real syslog file, due to the fact that there would be no room to store it on the 54GL.
7. Finally, I had to get wireless working. The documentation is very helpful when it comes to describing the syntax of the wireless configuration. Unfortunately, I read the list of encryption options and missed the section right below where their meanings are explained (although, to be honest, I might not have understood the implications of the explanation without the research I did anyway).

   option encryption none, wep, psk, psk2, wpa, wpa2

   I wanted WPA2 encryption, so I entered wpa2. And nothing worked. After a good hour of trying different options on the client, swapping software components in and out on the router, experimenting with the encryption key syntax, and crawling Google, I finally found my answer. If you just want WPA2 encryption, you must not use wpa2 as the encryption type. Instead, use psk2. It turns out out that wpa2 actually means use WPA2 and also use an external RADIUS server for authentication. psk2 is the system you're familiar with from a typical consumer wireless router.

Step 4: enjoy And with that, it works. Unfortunately, contrary to what I wrote here originally, my Roku still doesn't work. On the other hand, having a real Linux installation is helpful for debugging it. Currently my suspicion is that the router isn't passing multicast packets between the wired and wireless interfaces (broadcast works fine, multicast doesn't). That said, it seems like if I restart Firefly just before I start playing music, I can play reasonably reliably -- as long as I don't stop, because if I do, the Roku forgets that the music server is there. Either way, I've spent about as much time fighting this as I can afford. One lingering worry I have is security; unlike Debian, which has both a security mailing list and tools to inform me when I need to install a security update, the OpenWRT firmware doesn't seem to have any mechanism for distributing security notices. True, there is an openwrt-security-announce list, but it appears to be entirely unused, as is openwrt-announce. Something to keep an eye on, then. Also (file under note to self), I need to remember to verify that the router isn't exposing services to the outside world. The default iptables configuration is hideously complex; with just a quick glance, it could be setting up a floral shop for all I can tell. I'll need to test this empirically and maybe analyze the rules in more depth.

It's been a while since I made an upload of anything DHCP-related, so I thought a general update was deserved. The lovely test infrastructure that I built had to be cannibalised to stand in for some other hardware that failed on me, so that prevented me from being able to test as easily. Add to that, the distractions of moving house, and I just haven't had the time to do any work on the DHCP 4.1 packaging. That said, I haven't been completely idle. I've been pressing the ISC DHCP developers to incorporate the LDAP patch, which is extremely popular in some quarters. At the same time, I was able to flush the author of the LDAP patch (he'd seemed to have disappeared) and connected the two parties together. Hopefully we'll see something in 4.2 Today, I updated the 4.1 packages in experimental to 4.1.1, which includes a reintroduced LDAP patch. I think if there's no unfavourable feedback, I'll look at uploading this to unstable in the next month or so, and the great transition to DHCP 4 can commence (assuming the release time is cool with this). If I could just figure out how to do bridged networking with KVM and still use NetworkManager for my WiFi, I could probably set up a similar test environment to what I had before, on my laptop...

Quite surprisingly, I ll attend the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010 in Eastern Germany. This is a happenstance, I managed to get fast transportation (via my boss) and accomodation (in a hotel). I will try to help staffing the booth of Debian this time (so I cannot be called Traitor any longer). Schedule, due to the spontaneousness of this, no, though. I may not even be there on Sunday, dunno No RCBD (or night) though, some real life and a new release (with fix of an FTBFS-on-hurd-i386 bug) though:
RMD160 (/MirOS/dist/mir/makefs/makefs-20100306.tar.gz) = f65bd8ef5cf3306a9112587dd4915b6255e479fe
This version pulls in NetBSD changes (Acorn Archimedes support, for one), but I ve also coded support for boot-info-table (J rg compatible), as well as setting the PVD dates (used by GNU GRUB 2 for UUID s). On MirBSD, cdio(1) can now be used to burn (TAO) and blank (quick) CD-RW media (I backported some OpenBSD changes) too.

Following up my post about using google-code-prettify to syntax highlight code on Blogger, I want to share what I did to tune it for a dark theme.

Big warning: I'm completely ignorant of any web development, html/css/js are kinda arab (no offense intended) for me, so I'm quite sure there are more elegant solutions to this, but at least it works, and seems to have broken nothing :)

So, the default CSS has some bad values for tokens colors, in particular for the keywords and tags (that are in dark blue) and for the plain text (that is in black, so completely hidden).

What I did was to simply override those values, using this table as reference; so now the code to add to Blogger "Minima Black" template (the one I'm using) is:

<link href='http://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/prettify.css'
    rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<style type='text/css'>
.pln   color: #C0C0C0;  
.kwd   color: #4169E1;  
.tag   color: #4169E1;  
</style>
<script src='http://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/prettify.js'
     type='text/javascript'>  </script>

Tomorrow is the day for Paris half-marathon, the mass half-marathon that is traditionnally run 4-5 weeks before Paris marathon. This year, I'll run both, so tomorrow, I'll be running in Paris (and Bois de Vincennes) streets...along with 27,000 other people..., attempting to beat my 1h43'55" record set in my last (and as of now) only half-marathon, one month ago, in Bullion. That might be hard as running at one's own pace is easier in a run with 1,000 runners..:-) Ralf Treinen told me he might show up around km 7 (place de l'H tel de Ville). I should be around there around 11h50 as the start is at 10h and I should probably cross the start line at about 10h15, then run 5mins/km. So, if you're around eastern Paris and wake up "early" on Sundays, feel free to come and show me a nice Debian swirl so that I can run even faster (or less slow). I'll be wearing a black top with short sleeves and short running pants (not the easies to spot, I admit). Then try spotting Ralf and have a beer..:-).

I've got a few fixes to go into drivel 3.0.1 but I've been trying to decide on whether to re-factor the underlying code - libsoup specifically. Drivel has it's own way of handling xmlrpc messages and this method doesn't work well with the libsoup2.4 changes, so currently it backports some code from libsoup2.2. This isn't ideal for all the usual reasons and I've been waiting for time to sort it out.

Time is lacking. My change of career has dramatically changed the amount of time I have for upstream code and as long as drivel continues working for most people, I'm not sure how much time it deserves.

I've done a lot of refactoring in drivel already, for the GTK3 transition mainly, but this libsoup stuff is much more awkward because it raises new bugs with each blog engine that drivel tries to support. It's not helped when some blog engines retain broken XML practices that mean that the standard libsoup2.4 support simply fails to post a message with properties. (I'm looking at you livejournal.com).

Anyone fancy helping out with a branch where the old xmlrpc code can be replaced by soup_value_hash_insert? I've made an SVN branch for soup24 changes at SourceForge. There's a mailing list too (v.quiet).

I'm going to update a few screenshots, complete a few more tests and then release 3.0.1.

OCaml Batteries Included 1.1.0 has arrived in Debian I've just uploaded the Debian package of OCaml Batteries Included 1.1.0 to the Debian unstable archive; hopefully, it will quickly enter testing to be released with the next Debian stable release. This is the first release in Debian of the "new generation" of Batteries Included, which has followed a strict diet, and now has Camomile as its only external dependency. It took me a while to package it due to an intertwining transition to OCaml 3.11.2 (during which we have fleshed out the last remaining few bits of transition to our new dependency system). Also, I had to fix some typical build issue with upstream, which kindly coordinated with me to have the fixes included in 1.1.0. So go, enjoy Batteries 1.1.0, and let me know your feedback:

    # apt-get install ocaml-batteries-included

(check that it will install 1.1.0 though, it might take a few days to hit your favorite architecture and mirror) Tip: starting from this version you will need the following to use Batteries in place of the legacy standard library in your sources:

    open Batteries_uni

for multi-threaded programs you should rather use open Batteries. Check the FAQ file installed under /usr/share/doc/libbatteries-ocaml-dev/ for more quick start information.

I had this vague recollection of it being possible to do so, but I think Joerg's blog post has a poor page rank, so this is my attempt to give it a little boost.

You have a gitolite install on host $MASTER, and you want a mirror on $SLAVE. Here is one way to do that. $CLIENT is your workstation, that need not be the same as $MASTER or $SLAVE.

1. On $CLIENT, install gitolite on $SLAVE. It is ok to re-use your gitolite admin key here, but make sure you have both public and private key in .ssh, or confusion ensues. Note that when gitolite asks you to double check the "host gitolite" ssh stanza, you probably want to change hostname to $SLAVE, at least temporarily (if not, at least the checkout of the gitolite-admin repo will fail) You may want to copy .gitolite.rc from $MASTER when gitolite fires up an editor.
2. On $CLIENT copy the "gitolite" stanza of .ssh/config to gitolite-mirror to a stanza called e.g. gitolite-slave fix the hostname of the gitolite stanza so it points to $MASTER again.
3. On $MASTER, as gitolite user, make passphraseless ssh-key. Probably you should call it something like 'mirror'
4. Still on $MASTER. Add a stanza like the following to $gitolite_user/.ssh/config

    host gitolite-mirror
      hostname $SLAVE
      identityfile ~/.ssh/mirror
   

   run ssh gitolite-mirror at least once to test and set up any "know_hosts" file.
5. On $CLIENT change directory to a checkout of gitolite admin from $MASTER. Make sure it is up to date with respect origin

   git pull
   

6. Edit .git/config (or, in very recent git, use git remote seturl --push --add) so that remote origin looks like

   fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
   url = gitolite:gitolite-admin
   pushurl = gitolite:gitolite-admin
   pushurl = gitolite-slave:gitolite-admin
   

7. Add a stanza

   repo @all
     RW+     = mirror
   

   to the bottom of your gitolite.conf Add mirror.pub to keydir.
8. Now overwrite the gitolite-admin repo on $SLAVE git push -f Note that empty repos will be created on $SLAVE for every repo on $MASTER.
9. The following one line post-update hook to any repos you want mirrored (see the gitolite documentation for how to automate this) You should not modify the post update hook of the gitolite-admin repo. git push --mirror gitolite-mirror:$GL_REPO.git
10. Create repos as per normal in the gitolite-admin/conf/gitolite.conf. If you have set the auto post-update hook installation, then each repo will be mirrored. You should only push to $MASTER; any changes pushed to $SLAVE will be overwritten.

(Cross-posted from the OpenHatch blog.) I remember working on my first big group programming project back in college. The project involved some web scraping work; I enthusiastically took charge of that part. But a few weeks in, my code just wasn t working. I felt frustrated and helpless I m supposed to be the scraping expert, so why couldn t I fix the problems? I retreated into hiding and didn t want to think about the group of people or the project. A week later, I feebly ran svn update to see how the project had progressed. Oh! I exclaimed to myself. Someone made the data importer work! I felt a rush of relief. (While writing this paragraph, I sighed again remembering it.) When I talked to my teammate George, he mentioned off-handedly that he had fixed it. He didn t feel any of the anguish I felt or assign me the blame I thought I deserved. I guess if I had just asked for help earlier, I could have skipped the feelings of inadequacy entirely and George would have just fixed the bug. Half a decade later, I feel the same dread about the lack of Maildir support in Alpine. The bug is three years old! Ugh. This time, I m going to ask for help. So I listed the issue on the Alpine project page on OpenHatch. To put it there, here s what I did:

• I logged into OpenHatch and added Alpine to my list of projects.
• I followed the link on my profile to the Alpine project page.
• I answered the last question, What is a bug or issue with Alpine that you ve been putting off, neglecting, or just plain avoiding?

For those of you who work on Free Software projects, what are the issues that drain you the same way? No bug tracker I ve seen has a field that says, I m avoiding working on this, and that sucks. To say that, list the issue on your project s OpenHatch page. So join in! What are the issues you don t want to think about? Once you share them, maybe a fellow developer or a new contributor will come by and help you out. Head to OpenHatch and let the world know. P.S. Do you have any ideas about how we can make these project pages more useful? Let us know! P.P.S. Dear Joey Hess and everyone else, sorry that Alpine still doesn t have Maildir support.

Blogger has no feature to highlight code syntax in blog posts. But google-code-prettify comes to rescue.

The information in their README are quite generic, and treat the situation where you're directly managing the website files, which is not the case for Blogger.

Luka Marinko wrote a very nice blog post describing how to use google-code-prettify on Blogger; I'm going to follow his advices right away!

Work on Iceweasel 3.6 is approaching an end, but there are still issues with it and with 3.5 that I want to tackle before officially pushing to experimental. In the meanwhile, you can already try a preview package:

• for i386:
  • iceweasel
  • xulrunner
  • libmozjs
• for amd64:
  • iceweasel
  • xulrunner
  • libmozjs

The amd64 binary has the JIT compiler enabled by default (contrary to upstream default, and I guess most if not all other distros), so if you have issues with it, you ll need to disable javascript.options.jit.content from about:config. It passes the testsuite, so I expect it to be fairly stable.

Global trends For some time I have been trying to pinpoint what it is that is brewing in Italy and risks spreading elsewhere, like it happened in the past. I don't need to be decent to stay in power While following a train of thought during a political/philosophical lecture I figured that a current growing trend is to have public figures that are more and more indecent. In Italy it is very hard to find a public figure you can look up to. It is hard to name a politician that is not involved in some shady exchange of favours or some abues of their powers, and we got used to seeing people in power implicated in major corruption scandals, perverted prostitution affairs, or dealings with international criminal organisations. They do not normally end up in jail, and in fact they keep being very firmly in power, because they manage to stretch or change the laws to get away, or at least to delay trials in order to trigger some statute of limitations. Is there a pattern here that, although maybe not as clearly defined as in Italy, can be found more or less globally? Yesterday I thought that this could be such a pattern:

I don't need to be decent to stay in power

If I think of it like that, then it is most definitely not just an Italian phenomenon. If you tell "one doesn't need to be decent to stay in power" to a British, or to a French, I would not expect them to see anything strange with it. We all find it depressing, but we are all used to it. It is a pattern with repercussions, though: once that becomes normal in a society, it means that people who get to be in power are free to abuse their power much as they want, as long as they are careful enough not to end up in jail. Because, well, nowadays one doesn't need to be decent to stay in power. I don't need to follow the law to stay in power That first pattern is already quite well accepted in Italy. So much well accepted, that I think we are starting to see what comes next. At the end of March we are going to have elections for some regional governors. Funnily enough, in Lazio, the very important region around Rome, the centre-right coalition failed to submit the paperwork on time, and is out of the elections. It is not just red tape: at some point someone will have to print out the ballots and dispatch them to the voting booths, so one expects to have the coalition logos and the names of the candidates submitted in time, together with signatures supporting the candidates and whatever else the election process needs. Well, they missed the deadline, they got there after closing time and the building was, well, closed. It was a fantastic opportunity for a laugh. Memes blossomed on the Italian intarwebs and we now have 2 or 3 new expressions to mean "stupid". However, now it's hard to tell what is going to happen. On one hand, you can't exclude one of the two major coalitions because of some bureaucratic detail like an office closing time. But on the other hand, several minor coalitions have been excluded in all sorts of past elections because of similar things, and it really would not be fair to start making exceptions now. But Lombardia, the region around Milan and Emilia Romagna, the one around Bologna, both very, very important, are having similar kinds of problems. In both regions the previous governors are running again, for the 3rd time in a row, and most likely they legally can't do it, and if elected one can sue and force them to resign, because they have been in power long enough. Lots of paper is being shuffled at the moment to figure if they can get away with it or not. Oh, and the lawyers of the candidate for the Milan region also managed to get to the tribunal after closing time, but apparently there was still someone inside and they managed to shout loud enough, or somesuch. Anyway, the situation is getting hot. The Lazio coalition that has been excluded because of their incompetence is now hard at work pushing their potential voters to mount a fracas. Chances are that eventually they'll get away with it, and manage to take part to the election. If that happens, they will likely get close to winning it. So this seems to be a new pattern that is emerging:

I don't need to follow the law to stay in power

Which, again, is a pattern with quite some repercussions. It is something much more radical than just an issue with morality: it means feudalism, it means we are culturally ready to accept dictatorship. So, please do me a favour: do not think for a moment that Italy is just a funny place with lemons and tomatoes, and watch out for these patterns emerging around you.

I wanted a machine on which I could easily run OpenWRT. So I'd went to the #openwrt channel on freenode a while back, and just asked for suggestions; people suggested to me that the Netgear WNDR3700 was a good choice, so I ordered that. I assumed that it would be easy enough to install OpenWRT on this device, but hadn't actually looked into it, planning to wait with that until the device had arrived. Little did I know that the machine actually comes with OpenWRT preinstalled. Now there's an interesting twist. Now you do need to run some "telnetenable" thingy to be able to get a shell, after which "telnet <device>" gets you a root shell (with no username or password by default). Supposedly you should update that by using "passwd", but they managed to break that in the firmware that comes with the device. I am missing a few things, though.

root@WNDR3700:/bin# dmesg
/bin/ash: dmesg: not found
root@WNDR3700:~# uname -a
/bin/ash: uname: not found
root@WNDR3700:~# hexdump /bin/config  more
/bin/ash: less: not found

Unh?

root@WNDR3700:~# alias
more='less'
vim='vi'
root@WNDR3700:~# 

Aahh. And for those who were wondering: no, it does not have any 'vi' installed, either. Oh well. The fun thing is, this device has a USB connector, too; so it should be possible to connect a USB storage device, install Debian, and use it as a very potent home server/router/switch/whatever. That'd require me to understand how hostap works, though, which I haven't played with yet. I'm sure I'll figure that bit out -- at some point.

From RFC3164, which is otherwise about syslog formats:

6. Security Considerations An odor may be considered to be a message that does not require any acknowledgement. People tend to avoid bad odors but are drawn to odors that they associate with good food. The acknowledgement of the receipt of the odor or scent is not required and indeed it may be the height of discretion to totally ignore some odors. On the other hand, it is usually considered good civility to acknowledge the prowess of the cook merely from the ambiance wafting from the kitchen. Similarly, various species have been found to utilize odors to attract mates. One species of moth uses this scent to find each other. However, it has been found that bolas spiders can mimic the odor of the female moths of this species. This scent will then attract male moths, which will follow it with the expectation of finding a mate. Instead, when they arrive at the source of the scent, they will be eaten [8]. This is a case of a false message being sent out with inimical intent. ... Along the lines of the analogy, computer event messages may be sent accidentally, erroneously and even maliciously.

This smells more like "I bet nobody ever really reads this RFC, let's put some stuff in the middle to see if they do!".

Yes, my rant was more against the things I encountered during keysigning, not keysigning itself. However, I still feel X.509 doesn't have these problems, and nothing I can think of will persuade me to think PGP/MIME better than Inline PGP. (Especially when the recipient's key contains a notation that he wants the latter, but not the former.) Jonathan does have some good points about the (PGP) Web of Trust. Again, that wlog entry of mine was a rant; I had let the topic stew over night, trying to get the anger out, but on the next day it just wanted to get out of me, I merely wanted a good old rant. I think I'll not include Planet Debian next time I do rant, though (it's not the place to do so).