Improving the resilience of the Web of Trust

(this is a post in two parts) At the BoF of GPG Key Management: Best Practices, dkg had two immediate recommendations for improving WoT resilience: Regularly refresh your local keyring from the key servers; If you have spare space and transit, provide a key server to take part in the pool. Regular Refreshes This is…

Batch importing caff signatures

Having swapped details with many, many people at Debconf, and then been away for a week after that, I found myself with an overflowing mailbox and a long task of “open mail, provide pass-phrase, pipe to gpg –import“. I wanted a way to batch-import all these signatures (there are three times as many, because my…

Home, James

Since I didn’t actually come home from Debconf, but instead took a further week’s holiday and lazed around by the beach, I haven’t sat down to write anything about it yet. Most importantly, I should say thank you to Joey Hess, Steve McIntyre and Stefano Zacchiroli for arranging the Debconf Newbies programme, without which I…

At last, my body clock will be correct again

Note to self: because daylight saving time just ended and all the dak machines work in GMT, everything will happen at the advertised time again – not an hour later. Most significantly, the important dinstall run of the day is back at 00:52, and britney runs at 16:40 again. No more remembering to add an…

ftpmasters are rocking lately

My upload to NEW of pyquery the other day went through in an amazing time: Thu 13:36 RFP from Paul Wise Thu 19:08 I checked out the upstream source and started packaging Fri 10:59 Taniguchi Takaki sponsored it to NEW Fri 16:44 Barry deFreeze accepted it into unstable (all times GMT, because they cross zones…

No, bash, I don’t have any mail

Since some time earlier in the Summer, I’ve noticed this appearing a lot in a shells: You have mail in /var/mail/… You have mail in /home/…/Mail/… You have mail in /home/…/Mail/…/… and so on, yet when there really is new mail, the message is correct. I’ve filed it as bug #551487, but I can’t help…

Prom Lessons

Today I learned some important lessons: Co-ordinating seven people to arrive for a specified date and time does not work well without several hours headroom; When the Royal Albert Hall think a performance is 2h 30, and you think it’s 2h, you are very wrong; Underground trains do not traverse the whole city in fifteen…

Typing record

Bearing in mind I haven’t typed competitively for a very long time now, I thought I’d take five exercises and compare the trend: 75wpm @ 98% accuracy 82wpm @ 97.5% 95wpm @ 98.2% 99wpm @ 99% 80wpm @ 98% That’s pretty ok by me.

The Post-it Door

These are from November 2007 (I’ve been very lazy about processing them lately) at 18mm/f3.5. They’re literally straight from the camera; I haven’t touched them at all, since I’m on the road.