Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 19

I had my strong doubts as to whether the shipment would be allowed through customs, and was happily surprised by a smiling Graham today before noon. He handed me a smallish box that arrived to his office, containing… Our fifty C.H.I.P. computers, those I offered to give away at DebConf! The little machines are quite neat. They are beautiful little devices, including even a plastic back (so you can safely work with it over a conductive surface or things like that). Quite smaller than the usual Raspberry-like format. It has more than enough GPIO to make several of my friends...

Hello world! I’m very happy to inform that the Next Thing Co. has shipped us a pack of 50 C.H.I.P. computers to be given away at DebConf! What is the C.H.I.P.? As their tagline says, it’s the world’s first US$9 computer. Further details: https://nextthing.co/pages/chip All in all, it’s a nice small ARM single-board computer; I won’t bore you on this mail with tons of specs; suffice to say they are probably the most open ARM system I’ve seen to date. So, I agreed with Richard, our contact at the company, I would distribute the machines among the DebConf speakers interested...

Time passes. I had left several (too many?) pending things to be done un the quiet weeks between the end of the lective semestre and the beginning of muy Summer trip to Winter. But Saturday gets closer every moment… And our long trip to the South begins. Among many other things, I wanted to avance with some Debían stuff - both packaging and WRT keyring analysis. I want to contacto some people I left pending interactions with, but honestly, that will only come face to face un Capetown. As to “real life”, I hace too many pending issues at work...

I am submitting a comment to Wen Wen and Chris Forman’s Viewpoint on the Communications of the ACM, titled Economic and business dimensions: Do patent commons and standards-setting organizations help navigate patent thickets?. I believe my comment is worth sharing a bit more openly, so here it goes. Nevertheless, please refer to the original article; it makes very interesting and valid points, and my comment should be taken as an extra note on a great text only! I was very happy to see an article with this viewpoint published. This article, however, mentions some points I believe should be further...

I’ll tune in to the post-based conversation being held on Planet Debian: Russell Coker wonders about what’s needed to get university graduates with enough skills for a sysadmin job, to which Lucas Nussbaum responds with his viewpoints. They present a very contrasting view of what’s needed for students — And for a good reason, I’d say: Lucas is an academician; I don’t know for sure about Russell, but he seems to be a down-to-the-earth, dirty-handed, proficient sysadmin working on the field. They both contact newcomers to their fields, and will notice different shortcomings. I tend to side with Lucas’ view....

Debian is quite probably the project that most uses a OpenPGP implementation (that is, GnuPG, or gpg) for many of its internal operations, and that places most trust in it. PGP is also very widely used, of course, in many other projects and between individuals. It is regarded as a secure way to do all sorts of crypto (mainly, encrypting/decrypting private stuff, signing public stuff, certifying other people’s identities). PGP’s lineage traces back to Phil Zimmerman’s program, first published in 1991 — By far, not a newcomer PGP is secure, as it was 25 years ago. However, some uses of...

In the ARM world, to which I am still mostly a newcomer (although I’ve been already playing with ARM machines for over two years, I am a complete newbie compared to my Debian friends who live and breathe that architecture), the most common way to distribute operating systems is to distribute complete, already-installed images. I have ranted in the past on how those images ought to be distributed. Some time later, I also discussed on my blog on how most of this hardware requires unauditable binary blobs and other non-upstreamed modifications to Linux. In the meanwhile, I started teaching on...

Petter and Elena both talk enthusiastically about the Pyra. I am currently waiting for the shipment of my C.H.I.P. kit — I pre-ordered my kit when it was still in kickstarter phase, and got the PocketC.H.I.P. level. It is clearly not the same nor equivalent to the Pyra — The PocketC.H.I.P. is a convenient packaging for what is chiefly an System-on-a-chip; the C.H.I.P. is a small system by today’s standards (single-core ARM, 512MB RAM, not meant to be expanded), but still it looks quite usable as a very portable and usable Unix system. Oh, and of course — It’s also...

As many of you know (where “you” is “people reading this who actually know who I am), I come from a secular Jewish family. Although we have some religious (even very religious) relatives, neither my parents nor my grandparents were religious ever. Not that spirituality wasn’t important to them — My grandparents both went deep into understanding by and for themselves the different spiritual issues that came to their mind, and that’s one of the traits I most remember about them while I was growing up. But formal, organized religion was never much welcome in the family; again, each of...