Make a diff!
Due for a long time (apologies!), now I finally switched to full content feeds for your convenience.
RSS 2.0 full content feed
Atom 0.3 full content feed
Please adjust your subscription, if necessary. Migration to wordpress will probably follow sooner or later (yet another item on my to do list).
Mike Shaver, lead dev of Mozilla Lightning, will have a talk about “Technologies and Techniques for Security in the Mozilla Project” at the ZISC in Zurich on May 24. Very promising.
Further, his long awaited interview responses about Lightning have just been published.
If you’ve emerge sync’ed today and the output of an ’emerge -puD world’ on your CLI-only box looks similar to mine..
o2 media-libs # emerge -pu lib-compat
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies …done!
[ebuild N ] media-libs/audiofile-0.2.6-r1
[ebuild N ] media-sound/alsa-headers-1.0.8
[ebuild N ] media-libs/alsa-lib-1.0.8
[ebuild N ] x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.2-r1
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/utempter-0.5.5.5-r1
[ebuild N ] x11-terms/xterm-200-r1
[ebuild N ] media-libs/lcms-1.13-r1
[ebuild N ] media-libs/libmng-1.0.4
[ebuild N ] x11-libs/qt-3.3.4-r3
[ebuild N ] kde-base/kde-env-3-r3
[ebuild N ] kde-base/arts-1.3.2-r1
[ebuild N ] media-libs/libsdl-1.2.8-r1
[ebuild N ] sys-libs/lib-compat-1.4
..you might want to adjust your USE flag settings to anticipate the recent soft dependency changes in libsdl. Add “-arts” (KDE sound server, not needed on a headless server) to your USE flags in /etc/make.conf and the output will look like
o2 media-libs # emerge -puD lib-compat
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies …done!
[ebuild N ] media-libs/audiofile-0.2.6-r1
[ebuild N ] media-sound/alsa-headers-1.0.8
[ebuild N ] media-libs/alsa-lib-1.0.8
[ebuild N ] media-libs/libsdl-1.2.8-r1
[ebuild N ] sys-libs/lib-compat-1.4
Much better, isn’t it? ;) Of course, if you don’t like alsa, you can opt it out too.
Installed Bugzilla and Trac and a couple of other dev tools to complete the first development and runtime environment infrastructure of our[1] upcoming startup company (which will revolutionize quite some things in the blogosphere, if successful :)
If you take a close look at common OSS dev tools, it’s astonishing how limited most of them are. They usually follow a conservative, traditional “me too” approach to accomplish their tasks – despite of foreseeable drawbacks. I’d like to see more inventive and courageous approaches that lead to unconventional, but finally superior software instead of having a variety of very similar tools which are limited by design. It’s worth to take the time to think deeply about different (and also radically new :) approaches before digging into coding matters.
[1] So far, Ben’s and mine (interested to join? Contact us!)
I’ll be off to London from 05.05.-09.05.2005. Regarding the current London agenda, all I know so far is that there will be UK elections 2005 on 5th of May (perhaps the reason why accommodation in London is so scarce ATM?).
Are there any other {unique, great, funky, unconventional} must-see events (sounds, arts, sports, tech, business,..) in London between 05.-09.? Any hints welcome! :)
Grats to all the involved engineers, test pilots, staff and management! And a hooray on European cooperation ;)
There’s video footage available on the Airbus site:
Airbus.com: Pictures and videos of A380’s maiden flight
Airliners.net: Many pics
Randy Baseler, Vice President Marketing of Boeing (and blogger :), joins the congratulators. Obviously he knows the customs of good PR :)
There’s a new Gentoo derivative:
“Pentoo” is an acronym for “PENetration on genTOO”. It is based on kernel version 2.6.10, uses the Gnome desktop environment, and aims to provide a complete platform for intrusion detection, penetration-testing and security assessment. The content of the LiveCD can be updated, allowing for
up-to-date fingerprint and vulnerability databases, for tools that require regular updates like the Nessus plugins, or scanner fingerprint files, metasploit etc. Users can optionaly store data on USB sticks for non-volatile storage support. Pentoo’s author, Michael Zanetta, emphasizes that “it
has to be considered beta as I have not much time to test it carefully,” so feedback and comments are very welcome, at bugs@pentoo.ch. A roadmap for the project is available, too.
did you know you can configure mod_dav to allow read-only access to your webdav share (apart from the usual read-write access)? all you need is set “Options Indexes”, point your browser to the webdav url and enter your credentials. basically, i have the following mod_dav configuration[1]:
BrowserMatch “^WebDAVFS/1.[012]” redirect-carefully
BrowserMatch “Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider” redirect-carefully
BrowserMatch “Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600” redirect-carefully
BrowserMatch “^WebDrive” redirect-carefully
BrowserMatch “^WebDAVFS” redirect-carefullyLoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so
DavLockDB /var/lib/dav/lockdbDavMinTimeout 600
<Directory /path/to/the/dav>
Options Indexes
Dav On
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Please enter your webshare credentials”
AuthUserFile /path/to/the/passwordfile
Require user johndoe
</Directory>
i had to remove <Limit> restrictions as basic auth didn’t work with it for some reason. configuring a share that can be both accessed (read-write) using samba/smb/cifs and webdav is a bit more tricky and depends on which linux distribution you use. in a nutshell, you need to fiddle with directory permissions (especially the “sgid – set group id” bit) and figure out which setting works best (and the most securely) for you.
note that for security reasons, you should only allow encrypted http access (https using tls/ssl) to your share (see the <Redirect> option for example).
[1] in gentoo, edit /etc/apache2/conf/modules.d/45_mod_dav.conf
(thanks to flo for the tip)
nload, a decent network bandwith monitor for the linux console (you can thus use it to quickly monitor the available bandwidth on your remote linux server):
www.roland-riegel.de – nload: monitor network traffic and bandwidth usage
# emerge nload (surprise, surprise ;)
usage (for example):
# nload -i 2000 -o 400
(where 2000 is the [i]ncoming/downstream and 400 the [o]utgoing/upstream bandwith of my server in kbit/s)
(note that it doesn’t brew coffee, though ;)
(kudos to Crypto from #gentoo for the hint)
As the pictures of last Friday’s private sightseeing tour in Schwyz and Zug turned out surprisingly well (considering that I shot them rather carelessly using my compact digicam, i.e. amateur gear ;), I decided to make them public. I’ve removed any pictures with close-ups of people, therefore you may freely use these pictures for any purpose (credits welcome, however):
Some pictures I like particularly (more or less in chronological order; unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the Kloster Ingenbohl SZ):
The Kollegium Schwyz (where my father went to school)
The chapel inside the Kollegium (where he had to celebrate high mass and sing in the choir way too often, as he told me ;)
The bottom of the lectern in the church of Schwyz (where he had to celebrate high mass way too often, again ;), showing the ‘Aufdermaur’ emblem (my grandma R.I.P. was an Aufdermaur)
The Erlenkapelle (first built in 1485) in Ibach/Schwyz (my uncle wrote a not-yet-published chronicle about it I recently typewrote for him)
Some pics of the dock and the lakeside in Ingenbohl-Brunnen (where I happen to be citizen) at the border of the Vierwaldstättersee.
Note that there’s even a little bunker right at the foot of the famous Rütliwiese (where “Switzerland” was founded on August 1, 1291 AD according to the saga ;)
The rocky coastline of the Vierwaldstättersee (a rather deep lake with a depth of 214 m) (BTW Why go to Krabi if you can have rocky coasts in Switzerland? ;))
Bauen, a tiny village at the border of the Vierwaldstättersee where palms grow (due to the very mild climate).
Windsurfers in Flüelen (UR). The water was rather chilly despite of the sunny weather (hence the neoprene suits ;). Obviously nice winds nonetheless :)
The famous/notorious wall painting by Ferdinand Gehr (the people jokingly used to call the painted angels “Spiegeleier Gottes” [God’s fried eggs] due to their somewhat strange/simple shape reminding of fried eggs ;) in the Bruder Klaus church in Oberwil (ZG)
The lakeside and some cafes with a nice view on the lake in Zug (ZG)