Biella Coleman: 19th century tatoo
Wow, this looks like a real cool research project. Wish they had included some photos as well.
Biella Coleman: Water Canary: Toxic Sensing
I love drinking water, talking about the future of water, and am especially passionate about the need for clean water. I hate the idea that we have polluted our oceans, our lakes, our rivers and this water of life, is of course, indispensable. Today, I found out about this amazing project, Water Canary, a project out of NYU s ITP, which is building low cost sensors to detect toxins in water (in Africa in specific but it seems like every corner of the earth is quite eligible for such toxic sensing). All I can say is WoW. There is just so much potential for this type of project of informational visibility and I can t wait to see it develop.
Has anyone experience with 
So, SHA-1 has potential exploits, but you know what? I only use it for signing plain text things. Email, change files I ve no reason to use it for encryption, as I don t encrypt things
Surely, if anyone is going to make something that collides with a valid signature of mine, it s going to either a) be noticable to the person reading it (random characters in an email?) or b) not be processable by whatever automated sytem is using it.
I ve yet to hear of any exploit that could affect the way I use SHA-1 in a meaningful way. Ok, yes, I m not going to be using it to hash passwords in future (well, GPG uses it to hash passwords, but generally, to be able to crack that, someone would have to have my secret key anyway, which I would count as being compromised!)
If someone can give me a real world example of how this can be used against me, I might go out of my way to replace my key, but for now, I don t see the need. Ok, I might take the next time I meet up with a fellow Debian Developer as a chance to replace my key, but I m not going to go out of my way to do so (as I had to for getting my key signed by my first Debian/Ubuntu Developer in the first place)
We got back from our brief visit to Canada last night. We had a great time,
Vancouver and Victoria were both very nice.
YVR (Vancouver Airport)
This airport has to win the award for nicest airport I've seen. Clearly they
pulled out all the stops in preparation for the Winter Olympics next year.
The airport is very bright, airy and open. Before you even hit the
immigration line, you pass through a couple of water features, some
indigenous art, all of that jazz. Immigration is done in the open in a huge
hall, instead of in the dark bowels of the airport, which was a pleasant
change from the usual US airport immigration experience. (That said, Houston
airport had a pretty nice immigration experience). Oh, and it was blanketed
with free WiFi, which was a nice touch.
Ferry to Victoria
The brief geography lesson I got was that Victoria is on Vancouver Island,
and Vancouver (the city) is not on Vancouver (the island). Go figure.
Getting to Victoria from the airport via 
After years of being a dedicated KDE user it seems like it s finally time for me to go back to Gnome. I once tried KDE 4.x from the Debian experimental branch knowing that it s probably unstable and will require a lot of patience. But I was willing to report bugs and dive into new things.
It didn t take long though to find out that graphics were extraordinarily slow with the new desktop effects . The worst was resizing a konsole (KDE terminal window). It took 25 seconds until the window was resized and redrawn! On the interweb I found KDE developers rant about NVidia who didn t support some special extension they needed. They suggested to get an ATI card instead. (No, thanks, I was struggling with the crappy radeon and fglrx drivers on my new work laptop and am sick of ATI for Xorg.) Or I could use a bare XTerm instead. Yeah, right. So I couldn t use the desktop effects. After all I used the non-free NVidia driver for years and it never let me down.
I don t mind doing without eye candy. But the desktop effects were about the only serious way to switch between virtual desktops. Point the mouse into a corner or edge of the screen and get a zoom-out bird s view of the virtual desktops. Nice but quickly annoying. Besides you had to push the mouse pointer a few pixels into the edge (it s not sufficient to just hit the edge) which means that after 10 desktop switches I had to lift the mouse and set it back on the mousepad.
Another annoying issue is that up to now I can t assign functionality to every key on my keyboard any more. I had a neat trick by having 3 3=9 virtual desktops and use my numpad keys 1 to 9 to page through them. 0 on the numpad opened a new shell window. + on the numpad maximized a window. But now I couldn t assign any of those numpad keys. I pressed the 1 but KDE didn t detect Numpad_1 but just 1 . Guess how useful it is to not be able to type the 1 any more. There is a low-priority bug report for KDE from users who want this fixed but it will likely not happen any time soon. So the only way to switch desktops was to poke on the tiny pager widget in my panel. Yuk.
Not to mention that I couldn t put icons on the desktop any longer. There was just a sissy widget that I could use for that purpose but it didn t work like a conqueror or dolphin at all. It was pretty amusing when in KDE 4.2 there was suddenly a feature to re-enable the old behavior. Let me guess, KDE developers - I wasn t the only user you couldn t persuade of the new paradigm?
Next evil thing was performance. KDE 4 takes ages to load. Simple window managers get me started within seconds. Even Gnome. But KDE takes 30 seconds until it s loaded plus some disk grinding in the background. And memory usage wasn t nice either.
And what finally made me mad was stabilty - or rather lack thereof. Everytime the screen saver ran my kbluetooth module crashed. kmail crashed even more frequently than before. (I loved kmail for it s great customizability and feature set.) plasma (the actual window manager) died at least twice a day. Suddenly the panels were looking ugly or crashing.
As a Debian developer I have to follow the unstable branch on my workstation. And there is no distinction between KDE 3 and KDE 4 any more so a dist-uprade inevitably gets all of my applications upgraded to KDE 4 (plus an hour of manual engineering in aptitude because half of my applications weren t upgraded automatically due to different application names and I had a mixed environment). So there I was with KDE 4.2. I really worked with it for a month. I tried hard to get acquainted to its bloatedness and instability. It s really a nice technological preview of what might be possible in the future. Everything is really automatic. Mounting external media. New ways to find programs (although I m not happy with the new K start menu). Funny effects and nice eye candy. But it s far from the rock solid desktop environment that I was used from KDE 3.5.8.
So there I am on Gnome now. I was switching back and forth. One day working on KDE 4.2 and the other day using Gnome 2.26. And although it makes me feel sad I think it s finally time to say goodbye to KDE 4. I have invested a good amount of time and energy into it - even just from a user perspective. But it s not ready. And I finally need to get some work done. A number of projects suffered from my playfulness (my ispmail tutorial, screenshots.debian.net, debexpo, my kids) and it s time to get back to work. And Gnome was pretty surprising. With compiz I have the KDE desktop effects working (here they really do) and they are all customizable. I can assign keys properly again (even the numpad). Everything is pretty fast and stable. I have replaced kmail and its buggy shared calendar feature by Icedove (aka Thunderbird) with the Lightning plugin. Worked from the first minute and hasn t crashed in a week (just have to remember next time to install libstdc++5 to be able to use Lightning). With enigmail I finally have a proper simple working PGP key management that doesn t die and is buggy like hell like in kgpg. And there s the nice Nostalgy add-on that allows me to file emails into IMAP folder quickly again - a feature that just kmail seemed to support so far. Oh, and I see new mail instantly because Icedove supports the IDLE command while kmail has never learned that neat little trick. The Gnome file manager isn t really great for my taste but it s doing its job (dolphin is just much nicer). It s not as nice as KDE but I had to learn that working and stable weighs more than nice. The hard way. And many things I liked about KDE 4 (like starting a new program with Alt-F2 and having a smart application finder and simple calculator in one) are built into Gnome, too. So why bother.
Thanks, KDE, for the years of fun and service. I ll surely miss you. Get back to me should you grow up one day.
Tim and my mother are both neonatologists at the Golisano Children's Hospital inside the University of Rochester.
Earlier today, they had this conversation:
