Archive: Debian
RCBW, week two
Published by Jon on December 23rd, 2010 in Debian | Comments Off
This week: #606151 (nordugrid-arc-nox): cherry-picked a patch from upstream and uploaded to DELAYED/1 #606670 (minitube): removal bug filed at request of maintainer #607762 (dbus-glib): bumped the build-dependency and uploaded to DELAYED/7 (later pushed into DELAYED/0 at maintainer’s request) #607427 (opensc): applied security fixes from upstream and uploaded immediately Not quite one fix per day, as [...]
The perfect gpg-agent setup
Published by Jon on December 19th, 2010 in Debian | 5 Comments »
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
Published by Jon on December 16th, 2010 in Debian | 1 Comment »
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
Published by Jon on December 1st, 2010 in Debian, Notes, Tech | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
“Shibboleet”
Published by Jon on November 24th, 2010 in Debian, Tech | 3 Comments »
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
Published by Jon on October 27th, 2010 in Debian, News | 3 Comments »
матрациLast week I went to the sea side, and came back with a fiancée. Bliss. матрациLast week I went to the sea side, and came back with a fiancée. Bliss.
Facebook groups: a gift to framers
Published by Jon on October 25th, 2010 in Debian, Tech | 2 Comments »
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
Published by Jon on October 14th, 2010 in Debian, Tech | 9 Comments »
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
Published by Jon on September 30th, 2010 in Debian | 1 Comment »
I came across the mingetty changelog by chance while researching something totally unrelated. Paul Martin, you are a genius. mingetty (1.07-2) 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/ I came across [...]
The new, open Facebook
Published by Jon on September 26th, 2010 in Debian | 4 Comments »
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 [...]