Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

As you might know I publish some of my photos in my photoblog and on flickr under a Creative Commons license.

A very cool example of the so-called remix culture "happened to me" recently — one of the photos I posted on flickr was used as album art for a music CD, namely J. D. Warrick's "Going, a. The Leaving".

Btw., if you want to learn more about remix culture, Creative Commons etc. I can really recommend Larry Lessig's Wizards of OS 4 Keynote titled "The Read-Write Society" (OGG video: 144 MB, MP4 video: 224 MB).

• I have started looking into SELinux on Debian recently. SELinux provides mandatory access control for Linux, which gives you great control over which process may do what with which files, other processes, network connections etc. I've still got a lot to learn and read (more posts will probably follow), but if you're inclined to try it yourself here are a few tips:
  • First, read the SELinux and especially the SELinuxSetup pages in the Debian wiki. Also checkout the SELinuxStatus page.
  • There are currently a few bugs I noticed, which cause some trouble: bug #369852 prevents a correct install of the selinux-policy-default package, but the work-around mentioned in the bug report works fine. I reported bug #372543 yesterday, but there's an easy work-around for that, too.
  • I had to change "SELINUX=enforcing" to "SELINUX=permissive" in /etc/selinux/config (at least for now), otherwise my system won't boot up anymore because of SELinux denied permissions (I think). I'm pretty sure this is either a bug or me doing something wrong, but I haven't figured out yet what that is.
• Robert Nunnally (a.k.a Gurdonark) has created a photo collage video (YouTube, requires Flash) for Marco Raaphorst's "Blowing Snow" song. He used some of the Creative Commons licensed photos from my photoblog for the video.
• Wow! Today the number of people subscribed to my music podcast (via RSS) exceeded 200 for the first time! Thanks everyone for listening!
• GNU/Hurd 1.0.0 has been released. Finally! And they've built it on top of an interesting "middleware"...

I stumbled over CC Hits today, which looks like an interesting site with great potential. It's basically a digg-like site (implemented using ning.com, it seems) which doesn't list articles, but rather Creative Commons licensed songs. You can vote for the songs you like, just like you vote for articles on digg.com.

The site seems to be quite new, and there's not too much traffic yet, but I imagine it could become a very useful resource to find high-quality Creative Commons music. Which is similar to what I'm doing with my Creative Commons music podcast (subscribe here, yadda yadda), and most of the other CC music podcasts do, for that matter.

There's just too much CC music of varying quality out there by now — it's not so much a problem anymore to find some freely and legally available CC music (like it used to be a few years ago). It's more an issue of finding good music and/or music of certain genres you like... Anyways, I'm surely going to checkout CC Hits and use it to find new CC artists and songs for my podcast.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for more sources for good CC music, please leave a comment.

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Update 2006-06-05: On a related note, here's a song for all the geeks reading this: Code Monkey (MP3, 3.6 MB) by Jonathan Coulton, Creative Commons licensed, of course.

According to this (German) spiegel.de article, thieves have stolen a hard drive from the recording studio of the quite popular German band Rosenstolz.

Among the contents of the drive are unreleased songs from the past six years and two songs which should be released on a new single in a few weeks. Apparently those two songs on the drive were the only instance they had, off-site backups only contained older "beta" versions of the songs. As the band is touring at the moment (i.e. no time for re-recording the songs), it's unclear whether the single can be released in time.

Lessons learned:

• Backups, backups, backups!
• Disk-encryption is not only for paranoid computer geeks, but also for normal people like you and me[1]. Really! If that hard drive would have been encrypted they would still suffer because of the lack of good backups, but at least their unreleased songs wouldn't have fallen in the hands of the thieves. I bet those songs will soon appear in P2P networks around the globe[2].

(via Fefe)

[1] Well, I am a paranoid computer geek, and I'm probably not a normal person, but you get the point ;-)
[2] Oh, and if the thieves are stupid enough they will get caught while uploading the files ;-)

PhoneCaster.de is a nice service which offers podcasts via telephone. I received an email from them today which told me that someone had added my music podcast to their site (thanks anonymous stranger!).

This means that you can now listen to my podcast from your telephone or cell phone by dialing

(in Germany). I'm not sure if it works from outside of Germany, but you could try to call +49 931 663927 408. Please leave a comment and report whether it works or doesn't work.

There's quite a bunch of other podcasts available which you can listen to while in a train, on a bus, or while you're somewhere else without Internet access. This opens up some nice new possibilities...