Daniel Stone: ryan farmer is a spammer
Unfortunately, Matthew is correct, and it seems that Ryan Farmer is the idiot
that signed a few of us up to about 200 mailing lists this morning. Not only
do I trust Matthew's analysis (and was watching him go through the various
steps on IRC as it happened), but then there were two other bits.
Ryan refused to approve two of my comments I made on his latest blog entry (more than happy to screenshot this). He claimed he too had been spammed, and had to abandon his email address of a few years. Even if you ignore the length of the text blanked out in the title bar not even remotely matching the length of his personal email address, there were only 131 messages in the inbox, of which 127 were unread, and no others but spam visible. He claimed they were archived; I offered to publicly apologise if he'd do a quick screencast showing him logging into that account and showing some messages from the archive to prove the point. Unfortunately he didn't bother approving these comments. (Incidentally, if you had to 'abandon' an email address due to an avalance of newsletters, et al, which took an hour or two to fully unsubscribe from, would you still bother blacking out the address everywhere?)
As per his standard 'insult everyone with random images from the internet and YouTube videos, then wildly claim conspiracies against him' policy, he went on to claim Matthew was conspiring against him, but given the choice between Matthew conspiring and severely irritating a few of his friends in the process, and some scorned 16-year old continuing his track record of acting like an irrational, immature idiot, I know which one I'd pick.
It takes some skill to be banned from all the Ubuntu IRC channels and the Ubuntu forums both, but I guess this morning showed that was completely justified. Apologies to everyone waiting on the announcement of sponsorship for XDS, as well as hotels, but unfortunately some people just can't conceive of having better things to do than acting like chavs. Hopefully IzanbardPrince/TheAlmightyCthulu/etc goes back to impersonating Kevin Carmony, flaming the bejesus out of companies using BIOSes which trip Linux bugs, and other, equally productive, uses of his time.
Sin queso
As in previous years we have a 
After less than a week of vacation I've decided it was time to write a short
blog entry, as I plan to write at least another one in some days, as we are
waiting the arrival of Marc, our second son, for this week or the next one.
In the last months I haven't done what I said in my last posts, I'm quite busy
with the rest of my life and blogging or keeping my home computing
infrastructure is not on the top list.
Anyway I still have managed to do some things like giving a talk about
virtualization on the 
I have been thinking for quite some time about migrating the maintenance of 
Thousands of the worlds brightest, most handsome, and fragrant-smelling developers gathered in Bryant Square Park, New York City, for PreventaConf 2008
Project founder Jaldhar H. Vyas gave a stirring keynote covering such interesting and informative topics such as "Is Preventa just a big joke or are you really working on it?" The audience were shocked to learn that he actually is.
Last month, the dutch-languaged C'T featured an article about
retouching pictures with The Gimp, amongst others. Great timing, of
course, since everyone goes on holiday during summer, right? Right.
It's amazing what you can do with The Gimp and a bit of
basic knowledge. Take this picture, for example, which I took at this
year's FOSDEM:
I kindof like it, but the colors are a bit blend. Too much of a red
tint over everything. So, what we need to do, is change the curve:
Pardon my, eh, Dutch.
The trick is to remember that there are only so many colors which can
be represented in a (JPEG) photo. The histogram on the background
represents that; and by modifying the curve that is above the picture,
you can effectively change the colorspace that is available for any
peaks. If there's a lot of the darker blue in the picture, but less so
in the lighter regions of the blue (as in this case), you just give the
picture more space in the blue regions so that the blue that actually
exists in the picture can be better represented. We do this by lowering
the curve right before the peak, and by raising it afterwards, as the
above screenshot shows. After doing so for red, green, and blue, this is
the result:
Looks much better, right? Way more contrast, and the colors look much
more natural. And that only took me like 10 seconds to do.
Do watch out, though -- it's easy to overshoot, resulting in an ugly
picture; and you wouldn't necessarily want that. Also, if your camera
has a RAW mode, you're going to be able to do a lot more of this kind of
retouching with that than you would be using JPEG files. Then again, my
camera has RAW too, but I don't use it most of the time...
From my security monitoring:
Somehow (thankfully) I've managed to avoid much to do with backups in my
career as a sysadmin. It's always been someone else's responsibility, that's
been fine by me.
For some reason, I've been more paranoid lately, and with all of the crazy
shit I've been doing to daedalus, I wanted to have a backup, just
in case. Maybe it's old age.
So a while ago, I went and had a stab at setting up 
I ended up skipping the akademy keysigning, although I was signed up and looking forward to it.
I think the organizers should have kicked people that didn’t bring their own copy of the list instead of providing spare copies and trying to naively verify them.
If anyone on akademy is up for a key signature, please locate me and bring a snippet of paper with your key fingerprint and your full name. I’m hard to overlook.