Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 29

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...

Summer is cool in Mexico City. It is cool because, unlike Spring, this is our rainy season — And rains are very predictable. Almost every day we wake up with a gorgeous, clean, blue sky. Cool, nice temperature, around 15°C. The sun slowly evaporates the rain throughout the morning; when I go out for lunch, the sky is no longer so blue, giving way to a seemingly dirty white/grayish tint. No, it’s not our world-famous pollution: It’s just yesterday’s rain. Rain starts falling usually between 4 and 7 PM. Sometimes it starts as a light rain, sometimes it starts with...

Yes, I’ve been bragging about the Operating Systems book all over… Today, a colleague handed me a phone call from somebody at Editorial Patria, a well known educational editorial in Mexico. They are looking for material similar to what I wrote, but need the material to be enfocado a competencias — Focused on skills, a pedagogic fashion. I was more than interested, of course. As it currently stands, I am very happy that our book is being used already at three universities in three countries (by the different authors) and have heard other people saying they would recommend it, and...

Yay! Today I finally submitted our book, Fundamentos de Sistemas Operativos, for the Editorial Department of our institute. Of course, I’m not naïve enough to assume there won’t be a heavy editorial phase, but I’m more than eager to dive into it… And have the book printed in maybe two months time! Of course, this book is to be published under a free license (CC-BY-SA). And I’m talking with the coauthors, we are about to push the Git repository to a public location, as we believe the source for the text and figures can also be of interest to others....

A long time ago, I did some (quite minor!) work on natural language parsing. Most of what I got was the very basic rudiments on what needs to be done to begin with. But I like reading some texts on the subject every now and then. I am also a member of the ACM — Association for Computing Machinery. Most of you will be familiar with it, it’s one of the main scholarly associations for the field of computing. One of the basic perks of being an ACM member is the subscription to a very nice magazine, Communications of the...