Wednesday, May 28, 2008
With the cost of plane tickets approaching 2000 USD it is rather hard to sell me going to the Debconf 8 as that can be approximated as 3-4 months of my income. I did apply for travel sponsorship, but due to some kind of brainfart I misread “Amount I am unable to fund myself” as “Amount I am able to fund myself” and thus asked for far less money than I actually need. Therefore, after the Debconf team strictly stated that the requested amount can not be changed at this point, it has become clear that I cann’t come to Debconf 8.
/sadpanda
I would still love to come if there was sponsorship money to cover my fare and even suggested putting me to the end of the sponsorship priority list, but apparently that is not happening. Have fun, and see you all in Spain in 2009.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571
Īsumā - visas pēdējos divos gados uz Debian sistēmām (ieskaitot Ubuntu, Knoppix, …) ģenerētās SSH atslēgas, SSH serveru sertifikāti, SSL sertifikāti, x509 sertifikāti, OpenVPN atslēgas un DNSSEC atslēgas ir uzskatāmas par nedrošām. Nekavējoties atjaunojiet libssl-dev, libssl0.9.8-dbg, openssl un libssl0.9.8 pakas uz jaunākajām versijām un uzģenerējat jaunas atslēgas.
Sīkāk:
Serveru administrātoru darāmais:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade- Servera SSH atslēgas pārģenerācija:
sudo rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host*
sudo dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server
- Lietotāju atslēgu dzēšana:
sudo rm /home/*/.ssh/authorized_keys
- Informēt SSH lietotājus par nepieciešamību atjaunot viņu sistēmas un tikai tad uzģenerēt jaunu atslēgu un augšupielādēt to
- Dabūt jaunu SSL sertifikātu HTTPS darbībai
- Uzlikt jaunās ‘open*-blacklist’ pakas, kas neļaus pieslēgties izmantojot nedrošas atslēgas
Popularity: 15% [?]
Sunday, May 11, 2008
I am having a problem of my tiny Fonera router restart on me endlessly whenever I have two laptops with Azureus running connect to the network, so I started to investigate. I could not get any meaningful error messages from the router before it reboots and the only weird thing I could find in the statistics was the huge number of active connections. When I have one laptop with Skype running, Firefox browsing a few pages and Internet radio playing the number of active connections was around 200. Starting Liferea for RSS bumps that to 300. Nothing serious. However, as soon as I start Azureus (with no active downloads!) the number of active connections jumps by 400-500, starting one download adds another 300 connections. That is despite setting a maximum global limit of active connections to 100 in Azureus preferences. After 5-10 minutes the number of connections goes down to 500 (with one download active), but with two laptops with Azureus in the same wireless network the initial spike is high enough to kill the router in 2-3 minutes, force it to reboot and then do it all over again, and again, and again …
No I am thinking whether to spend around 50€ for another router or try to work with Azureus folks to try to fix this. 
Popularity: 27% [?]
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
From http://159.18.52.69/raw/983493
Error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test.py", line 12, in module
from xml.dom.ext.reader import HtmlLib
ImportError: No module named ext.reader
Fix/workaround:
+ sys.path.append('/usr/lib/python%s/site-packages/oldxml' % sys.version[:3])
from xml.dom.ext.reader import HtmlLib
I had an old Python script doing some XML work and after upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 I started getting the above error message and had to use the above fix because the Ubuntu packages of python-xml moved the xml.dom.ext.* to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/oldxml for some reason. Have not looked at the latest Debian packages. Does anyone know why such back-compatibility breaking change was introduced? All I find on Google are the people getting bitten by this bug and no reasoning or even discussion behind the change.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Most absurd religious bullshit in long time. Baby Jesus cries like being stabbed in the eye with a fork. It is like a sweet gay love orgy between baby Mohamed, baby Jesus and baby Abraham while baby L. Ron Hubbard films it all and baby Buddha gives artistic directions. Wouldn’t you want to see that Holy Trinity? Just as real and inspiring as the other one. Baby Jesus is a fictional character just like Donald Duck or Terminator, get over it.
If your personality is fully determined by several thousand years old megalomaniac fantasies to the point where you are unable to accept satire about it, you might have serious psychological issues and should seek professional help. If people get seriously offended at anything written online it is their own personal psychiatric problem. The fact that such irrational over-offensiveness is promoted in US. Opinion is an opinion even when stated as a fact or amusing expression or observation. Being offended by an opinion is a clear sign of lack of personal integrity and self-awareness. Don’t enforce your own psychological deficiencies on others or baby jesus will cry like he crapped his pants before the age of diapers.
Popularity: 36% [?]
Saturday, April 12, 2008
For a Debian package creation seminar:
Popularity: 17% [?]
Monday, April 7, 2008
The new release from the Debian EEE PC Team is simply great - it works flawlessly to install a fully functional Debian install onto an EEE PC over wireless. You only need a 16 Mb USB stick (or SD card) to boot from.
The only remaining bug that people are still working on is the selection of the wireless network - int the current build the installer autoselects the strongest signal by default and if you want another you need to go back and reconfigure the network in the installer.
Great work guys!
BTW: This got me thinking - it shouldn’t be too hard to take over the EEEPC from the default installation without having to have a USB stick or an SD card 
The default EEE PC setup consists of a (read-only) system partition and a user partition overlay. It should be simple to download the 16 Mb D-I boot image, save it to the system partition and write a boot loader that would allow the choice between normal boot, EEE PC rescue boot and Debian installation boot. With a bit of pre-seeding we could have the d-i install a Debian instance in place of the user partition unless the user overrides that.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Friday, March 21, 2008
Occasionally I post (or could post) things that are not fit for Debian Planet (non-English) or Ubuntu.lv Planet (unrelated to Latvian or Debian/Ubuntu matters), so I finally budged and switch the planet feeds to their own categories so that such things can be managed on a per-post basis.
Anyone know a Wordpress plugin that would allow to set multiple default categories?
Popularity: 19% [?]
Sunday, March 9, 2008
I was consulting a small company with a couple Debian servers the other day and I found that they did not have some packages that I expected to be there. Now thinking about it on every server that I install or take over the first thing I do is install a bunch of packages, such as: sudo, mc, wajig, localepurge and a bunch of others that I can’t remember at the first moment, but that I re-discover each time I find them missing. I assume that other people have discovered other great non-standard tools that I am missing out on.
What software do other people consider standard on their servers?
Popularity: 19% [?]
Friday, March 7, 2008
In the Latvian l10n community we often deal with the problem of mistranslation of common words such as “file”, “preferences” and “advanced”. There are several words that fit each of those and over the years preferences in the community have shifted back and forth.
I just came up with an idea of making a script that would download all the translations, search for these common words in the source strings and see if any of the common translations and mistranslations are in the translation for that string. Then it could form up a web page with statistics of the mistranslations and possibly even links to specific instances to allow for corrections. It would also find new mistranslations
How other translation teams handle this problem?
Popularity: 18% [?]
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