When I first started using Debian properly, I played with gpg-agent and pinentry but I didn’t really understand the various bash initialisation scripts, and my botched setup annoyed me so much I disabled it again quite quickly (for example, if I left the machine logged in to GDM at home then logged in through SSH,…
Getting stuck into RC bugs
Now that it’s much more convenient for me to do NMUs, and simultaneously there a handful of bugs that I can actually deal with, I guess it’s about time I got stuck into some RC bugs. Here’s my (rather modest) list of fixes for Squeeze the past few days: #606298 (deal.ii): can’t be reproduced by…
Dovecot, Lighttpd and SSL certificate renewals
This is a mental note really, since my certificates last two years and I’ve always forgotten what to do about it. Generate a new request:openssl req -new -key <keyfile> -out <csrfile>StartSSL throw away all properties of the request except the key, so any answers will do. Re-use the request you sent last time (thanks Noel)….
“Shibboleet”
Boy, I wish that word worked. Today I had cause to email O2, the local Telefonica outpost, to have them disassociate my phone from the Cloud hotspot network, to which I get a subscription with my contract. This is so that I can associate my new Desire Z instead. I explained that I can connect…
Engagement
???????Last week I went to the sea side, and came back with a fiancée. Bliss.
Facebook groups: a gift to framers
I didn’t quite believe what I was seeing until I searched and found several other people noticing the same behaviour. For background, Facebook recently introduced the concept of groups – not in the sense we’ve been used to, but more like lists. Groups are supposed to be to lists what databases are to bits of…
Dear CSI and other hi-tech television producers
Please stop perpetuating the myth that any old grainy image can be enhanced beyond all recognition. It’s not possible to read a newspaper at a thousand paces any more than it is to see around corners, even with a Really Big Computer. Every time one of my users brings me a photo and asks, “can…
Locusts
I came across the mingetty changelog by chance while researching something totally unrelated. Paul Martin, you are a genius. mingetty (1.07-2)Â unstable; urgency=high * Critical security patch: Fix unsafe chroot call. (Closes: #597382) * Checked dependencies for locusts. (Closes: http://xkcd.com/797/) — Paul Martin <masked> Sat, 25 Sep 2010 01:51:12 +0100 Original cartoon: http://xkcd.com/797/
The new, open Facebook
After the famous Facebook outage a few days ago, Facebook Engineering made a – to be fair, reasonably detailed – statement on what went wrong and how it affected the service. One particular comment attached to it drew my attention: “It’s great to hear and see that big companies like Facebook are so open with…
Taking good care of your keyring
Recently I was surprised to find that many of the rules I took for granted when dealing with an OpenPGP keyring, and the other activities associated with a web of trust, were new to some people I spoke to. These rules are born from a mixture of experience, accepted good practice, and wider reading, with…