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…
Translation fail
I got this in my Debian mailbox the other day (it’s an invitation to Facebook, in French): Bonjour Jonathan, Je vous ai invite rejoindre Facebook recemment et je voulais vous rappeler que de que vous serez enregistre, vous pourrez vous connecter […] and so on, right down to the end where there is this gem:…