Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

I'm stumbling over lots of interesting KDE stuff lately. First, I'm a long-time happy user of akregator, a very nice KDE RSS Reader, which I use for my daily blog and news reading. Second, I'm using KOrganizer (calendar + organizer) on a regular basis for about 3-4 weeks now, and I'm quite content with that, too.

At this very moment, I'm compiling Taskjuggler, a very nice project management tool for KDE (a Debian package is on it's way). The screenshots definately look very promising.

Fresh from Planet Debian: Isaac Clerencia reports that KDE and Wikipedia announced a cooperation. They're planning a Webservices API which allows KDE (and other) applications to query Wikipedia content and embed it into the applications (e.g. a music player could display information from Wikipedia about the artist performing the currently played song).

Nice stuff.

My Unmaintained Free Software wiki is down since yesterday. I don't know what happened, but I cannot ssh into the VServer where I host the site anymore. The server also hosts Holsham Traders, which is down, too (the SourceForge project page still works, fortunately).

Also, I'm currently not reachable through uwe@unmaintained-free-software.org or uwe@holsham-traders.de as my Postfix server is not reachable either. Please use uwe@hermann-uwe.de for emails.

Of course I stupidly neglected regular backups long enough, so that this could turn out to be a major problem...

I asked the hoster of the VServer what the problem is and what I can do to get my sites running again. The answer: "Reinstall the server". Upon reading that, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or simply terminate my contract with them immediately.
I mean - come on - that's a fucking Debian box running there, not some not so stable operating system, which needs regular reinstalls.

I basically told them so in another email and asked them to at least send me tarballs of /var/www and other relevant directories plus a dump of the MySQL database. No answer so far.

I'm really curious how this will all end — if one of their disks crashed or their servers burnt down or something, I'm screwed.

Software patents are to be introduced in the European Union, soon. Software patents suck.
Spread the word. Stop software patents before it's too late.

Get informed:

• noepatents.eu.org
• nosoftwarepatents.com
• Wikipedia: Software patent debate
• FFII Patinfo FAQ

Protest:

• Sign the EuroLinux petition
• Participate in the Web Demo and tell the world that you do so
• Put banners on your homepage
• Blog about how software patents suck
• Participate in the Photo Demo
• Write letters to the responsible politicians

Software patents were stopped in India. We can prevent them in Europe, too. But we need to act. Now.

A lot of hype is going on lately about OpenSolaris. Here's a short summary (mixed with some stupid comments from me) for those who missed the news until now.

• Although the license (the CDDL) has been OSI-approved, it's not exactly a license I'd consider free. It's especially not GPL-compatible, it seems.
• The usual grep "idiot" * in the source code and similar searches (which do reveal some hits, although the code was cleaned before the release), are being discussed on Slashdot and elsewhere. My personal favourite is this comment in the code:
  Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.
  Bad luck for this guy.
  Lessons learned: Always write your code and comments as if the whole world could read them, because one day that might be the case.
• Jörg Schilling is preparing SchilliX, an OpenSolaris distribution and LiveCD.
• A small analysis of the code, performed by me using David Wheeler's sloccount:
  The whole source contains ca. 4.1 million lines of code (MLOC), spread across ca. 24.000 files. (OpenSolaris ships with a complete Perl distribution in the tarball. I removed that before the analysis).
  Compare this to Linux: ca. 4.2 MLOC (Linux 2.6.11.10) in 18.000 files.
• Rumours about a Debian GNU/OpenSolaris seem to float around. The license might be a problem, I guess. We'll see...

Update: The above quote is from the GRUB source code (included in OpenSolaris), not from the original OpenSolaris code. Thanks for the corrections. Also, Linux has 4.2 MLOC, not 4.2 LOC (yay, I spotted that one myself ;-).

Hm. Bruce Schneier and Microsoft's Jesper Johansson tell us to write down our passwords.

That may sound like a stupid idea, and many years lots of security-minded people tried to educate users not to do that. But I think they have a point. Someone who uses the Internet regularly accumulates a whole bunch of accounts and passwords for all sorts of sites, servers etc. It's simply too hard to remember all of them. Thus far I agree.

But, I don't think writing down passwords on small pieces of paper and carrying those around in your wallet is a particularly good idea. It happens too easy that you lose your wallet, it gets stolen, or you lose the pieces of paper. Not to mention all kinds of social engineering activities, which are simplified a lot by this approach...

I do propose to write your passwords down. But do it in a computer file on a box where you're the only one with an account (your home PC or laptop). Encrypt that file with GnuPG and your're reasonably safe. Every time you need a password, decrypt the file, read and use the password, then wipe the decrypted plain-text file.

No more pieces of paper - help save the environment.