Traditionally the integrity of third party software downloaded from the Internet has been verified with MD5. The MD5 sums are stored in the FreeBSD CVS Repository. This had been useful for discovering Trojans. A lot of Software vendors like e.g. Werner Koch of GnuPG sign their software with their PGP-key. Should the FreeBSD ports collection support automatic verification of these signatures?
Why cook?
Andreas wrote about Making Sushi at home.
I am lazy, so i tested the Akakiko delivery service for the first time, as they started to deliver to my district recently. The food was ok, nearly like in the restaurants, although the packaging was not as stylish.
With the food I got three 100g pots of Wasabi radish with “Merry Chrismas” labels as a present. I am not sure, what I should do with these, since they expire in May.
DNS Madness continued.
arved.narf.at is currently was broken. I know why I have used my IP adress everywhere on this page.
I have searched for more than an hour for the problem, because some machines had the real IP in their DNS Cache, Browser Cache, and I don’t know where. I really suck at debugging DNS Problems.
The problem was a typo in the zonefile, that occurred during transmisssion of the narf.at zone to another Nameserver. Everything should be fixed in a few hours.
Dropping ports
Since university starts next week, I have dropped half a dozen portmaintainerships. If you like playing kdelibs-based Games, there are now a bunch of them available for adoption.
I am now back to maintaining 20 ports.
Firetide
Juli posted today to developers@, that the User Guide of the FreeBSD-based WLAN-Accesspoint “Firetide HotPoint Wireless Mesh router” contains a list of FreeBSD Developers. Nice, although I don’t know if they will now sell more routers, with my name in the User Guide. And I am quite sure, that none of my FreeBSD work is used in the Router, since I am not working on the Networking Code.
Multilanguage Blogging
The first question, when starting a blog is the question about the audience (see lauri’s recent article). After admitting that this blog isn’t purely for myself, the next question is about the language (“First Post!!!1” vs. “Erster!!!!1”, “Hello World” vs. “Hallo Welt”).
Since at the beginning of this blog at least a minority of possible readers was not german speaking, this blog started in english, although it is not my native language. (Another reason was, that i wanted to improve my english skills when writing about non-computer topics). Of course there are sometimes topics I want to write about, but since I am too lazy to translate, they were never published (But maybe these entries are so banal, that they aren’t worth to be published anyway). Also, writing in english takes a longer time than it would take to write in german, so I sometimes don’t have the time to write. Maybe this makes my blog less personal.
Another point, there are most likely a lot of germanisms in my entries, that discourage the readers. The German language has already entered silently when I started to add my blogroll to the left side of the indexpage.
Several reports have been published, that the real borders of the “borderless internet” are languages, since very few people are able to express themselves in more than one language, and most people don’t speak more than two languages, or are interested in reading longer articles in foreign language. (And babelfish has still a lot of shortcomings to be usable on a regular basis)
I have seen several blogs on the internet, that mix languages, I don’t like that idea, the blogs look cluttered.
Another solution would be, to write two blogs in different languages. An interesting experiment. Which blog would have the more personal articles? Which blog would have more articles? Which blog would have more readers?
Unfortunately I currently don’t have the time to write two blogs, or to translate my blog entries, so this questions will stay unanswered.
New Music Tuesdays
Today Apple subscribed me to a mailinglist called “new music tuesdays”.
Another entry in my .procmailrc.
Why do they think I want to read such a mailinglist?
How could I believe that Apple was smarter than other companies?
The World's Dumbest Dad
I decided not to go to work today. Instead I read this book by the icelandic author Mikael Torfason.
It is about a 28-year-old man, who is a stoma patient, that is facing the hard reality of life, sex and especially his family, who are like him (Ex-)alcoholics and/or mentally disorderd.
Recommended, but beware you will get into a midlife crisis after reading :-).
Resolved: My external Harddisk
Today my external Harddisk arrived from its journey to Wels. This time Medion exchanged the power supply. Now it finally works. I just tested the Firewire connection to my iBook. I am considering buying a Firewire controller for huckfinn or sauna, because huckfin has no USB controller and sauna has only an USB 1 controller.
Photoblogging
Since nothing interesting happend in my backyard, this weeks picture shows my subway station. The station “Alser Strasse” is one of the old “Stadtbahn”-stations designed by Otto Wagner, Vienna’s famous Art Nouveau architect in the 1890s.
In the foreground you can see the Viennese “Guertel”, one of Europe’s largest inner city roads (6 tracks)