Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Someone seems to hate George Lucas.

MediaWiki 1.5alpha1, the first unstable release of the 1.5 series of the software that runs WikiPedia, is out.

There's some important release notes there:

** WARNING: USE OF THIS ALPHA RELEASE MAY INFEST YOUR HOUSE WITH **
** TERMITES, ROT YOUR TEETH, GROW HAIR ON YOUR PALMS, AND PASTE **
** INNUENDO INTO YOUR C.V. RIGHT BEFORE A JOB INTERVIEW! **
** DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU, MAN. WE TOTALLY DID RIGHT HERE. **

Oleg Popov has recently started a new wiki called WiKi4All, which aims to be a catalog of wikis, where all existing wikis are listed in certain categories.
He's actively visiting loads of wikis and leaving a message for the maintainer to add his/her wiki to WiKi4All. I have already added Unmaintained Free Software there, and Crazy Hacks and Holsham Traders will follow soon.

Holsham Traders, by the way, is a realtime multiplayer trading game written in Ruby, which I'm currently developing (more on that later).

I'm happy to announce that my (German) Drupal article has now been translated (not by me) and will be published tomorrow in Issue 55 of the (English) Linux Magazine.

It doesn't appear to be available online, unfortunately.

Mark Burnett poses an interesting question in his SecurityFocus article Security for the Paranoid:

Is it time to worry when security professionals consider you too paranoid?

I consider myself quite security-aware (or paranoid, as you like), too, but some of Mark Burnett's measures are really quite extreme. For example:

I require my kids to use at least 14 character passwords on our home network and I'm considering issuing them smart cards. [...] I don't just throw out shredded documents; I spread the shredded bits into my garden to use as mulch.

However, I really agree with him on this issue: "There's no need to analyze the threat of every situation. Just practice strong security always and you should be okay". I couldn't have said this any better.