Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 28

Two causally unrelated events which fit in together in the greater scheme of things ;-) In some areas, the world is better aligning to what we have been seeking for many years. In some, of course, it is not. In this case, today I found our article on the Network of Digital Repositories for our University, in the Revista Digital Universitaria [en línea] was published. We were invited to prepare an article on this topic because this month’s magazine would be devoted to Open Access in Mexico and Latin America — This, because a law was recently passed that makes...

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El pasado mes de julio tuve nuevamente la oportunidad de participar en el congreso anual que organiza Software Gurú, presentando la conferencia Desarrollo de software y criptografía.1 Me doy cuenta que, si bien su relevancia resulta clara y hay interésen la comunidad de desarrolladores por comprenderlo, el tema de la criptografía es visto por muchos como un tema casi mágico o místico: Hay unos pocos expertos, pero está fuera del alcance para el común de nosotros, los simples desarrolladores que carecemos de un sólido conocimiento matemático de fondo. Y sí, no puedo negarlo: El uso correcto de la criptografía requiere...

Back in 2009, I set up githubredir.debian.net, a service that allowed following using uscan the tags of a GitHub-based project. Maybe a year or two later, GitHub added the needed bits in their interface, so it was no longer necessary to provide this service. Still, I kept it alive in order not to break things. But as it is just a silly web scraper, every time something changes in GitHub, the redirector breaks. I decided today that, as it is no longer a very useful project, it should be retired. So, in the not too distant future (I guess, next...

I got word via the Electronic Frontier Foundation about an act of injustice happening to a person for doing… Not only what I do day to day, but what I promote and believe to be right: Sharing academic articles. Diego is a Colombian, working towards his Masters degree on conservation and biodiversity in Costa Rica. He is now facing up to eight years imprisonment for… Sharing a scholarly article he did not author on Scribd. Many people lack the knowledge and skills to properly set up a venue to share their articles with people they know. Many people will hope...

I am among the lucky people who got back home from DebConf with a brand new computer: a Banana Pi. Despite the name similarity, it is not affiliated with the very well known Raspberry Pi, although it is a very comparable (although much better) machine: A dual-core ARM A7 system with 1GB RAM, several more on-board connectors, and same form-factor. I have not yet been able to get it to boot, even from the images distributed on their site (although I cannot complain, I have not devoted more than a hour or so to the process!), but I do have...

Dear lazyweb, I am tired of finding how to get my users to happily print again. Please help. Details follow. Several years ago, I configured our Institute’s server to provide easy, nifty printing support for all of our users. Using Samba+CUPS, I automatically provided drivers to Windows client machines, integration with our network user scheme (allowing for groups authorization — That means, you can only print in your designated printer), flexible printer management (i.e. I can change printers on the server side without the users even noticing — Great when we get new hardware or printers get sent to repairs!)…...

OK, it’s almost one month since we (the keyring-maintainers) gave our talk at DebConf14; how are we faring regarding key transitions since then? You can compare the numbers (the graphs, really) to those in our DC14 presentation. Since the presentation, we have had two keyring pushes: First of all, the Non-uploading keyring is all fine: As it was quite recently created, and as it is much smaller than our other keyrings, it has no weak (1024 bit) keys. It briefly had one in 2010-2011, but it’s long been replaced. Second, the Maintainers keyring: In late July we had 222 maintainers...

I love to see there is a lot of crypto discussions going on at DebConf. Maybe I’m skewed by my role as keyring-maint, but I have been involved in more than one discussion every day on what do/should signatures mean, on best key handling practices, on some ideas to make key maintenance better, on how the OpenPGPv4 format lays out a key and its components on disk, all that. I enjoy some of those discussions pose questions that leave me thinking, as I am quite far from having all answers. Discussions should be had face to face, but some start...

I still consider myself a newbie teacher. I’m just starting my fourth semester. And yes, I really enjoy it. Now, how did I come to teaching? Well, my training has been mostly on stages for different conferences. More technical, more social, whatever — I have been giving ~10 talks a year for ~15 years, and I must have learnt something from that. Some good things, some bad habits. When giving presentations, a most usual technique is to prepare a set of slides to follow/support the ideas. And yes, that’s what I did for my classes: Since my first semester, I...