SVU’s blog

Misc

Regarding recent discussions related to (D)VCS for GNOME, I think people might fight interesting results of the voting on highly popular Russian Linux site (analog of Slashdot). The comments is all in Russian, but everyone can read and interpret the results… (Just in case you care to follow the link, “Не использую”=”Do not use”). May be, staying with the current Subversion is not a bad idea, after all?;)

Yesterday, I reformatted internal n810’s flash from FAT32 to ext3. Why? Because root partition is too small and crouded. Now, I have several Megs of canola2 covers, this is too much for my small root…

BTW, I could not find the way to make canola use non-default place for disk covers (and symlinking to FAT32 partitions does not help - there are some issues with Russian dirnames).

¡No Pasarán!

That is why a lot of free software people consider Miguel as some kind of “Pro-Microsoft Trojan horse”. That posting looks to me like rather impudent attempt to shift community attention from one real problem (patents-charged OOXML as ISO standard) to some set of other (also real but still) unrelated issues.

DHCP+NTP and various OSes: Ubuntu, OS2008, …

I am trying to establish my own time server in the home LAN.

First I configured a couple of Ubuntu instances (matter of adding “ntp-servers” to request specified in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf)

Unfortunately, out of the box OS2008 ignores NTP server provided by DHCP. In order to enable that functionality, I had to add a couple of lines into /etc/udhcpc/udhcpc.script:

[ -n "$ntpsrv" ] && echo "server $ntpsrv" > /etc/ntp.conf.dhcp
/usr/sbin/ntpdate-debian

My next question is how to make MacOS X use that information (and check MSWin btw)

Google, WTF?

After some investigation I found the most probable reason of the break-in into my gmail account, which caused the spam message to be broadcasted to my entire gmail address book.

GMail performs login using https. Then (bah!) it redirects to http! All further interactions are done in insecure mode - unless the original address you typed in your browser started with https (or you change it manually and explicitly in the address line). Awesome, isn’t it? For details, see for example here.

So, I guess when I read my gmail using some occational free hotspot in the city (thanks to my n800), there was some “man in the middle” attack. It is not a big deal for minimally educated script kiddie - once http stream is not encoded and all cookies are there…

I definitely blame myself for being so lame and not knowing that bad fact about GMail (and not being paranoid enough to check the security of the connection when I have to). But I am deeply disappointed that GMail is so unsecure by default - and that information is not printed with big red letters on top of the page.

I guess there might be some people around who are still not aware of that shameful detail about GMail - so I am warning them.

Apologies

My GMail account got broken today - the spam message got sent to my entire abook. I sincerely apologize to everyone who got that spam. I will try to find out how it could happen… Deeply sorry.

WMF handling, various apps and libs

I guess, a number of people would find this report interesting and insightful…

Likewise, countless contributors’ first experience of the GNOME organization has been an attempt to have their blog added to the Planet GNOME page. The board has allowed Jeff Waugh total control over this, so their first experience is usually to be ignored, then to be accused of lying, and often to be abused. Some of them give up at the first stage, and I can’t blame them. You don’t hear their thanks.

Thanks, Murray

RMS: back in USSR?

There is information floating around that RMS is going to visit Russia in February or March 2008. The invitation is organized under patronage of well-known Russian politician Colonel Viktor Alksnis. Since my blog is aggregated on highly visible planet.gnome.org and planet.freedesktop.org I feel obliged to express my concerns about that coming event.

Before making any commitments, RMS should have checked the people who he deals with. Viktor Alksnis (nicknamed as “Black Colonel”) is a politician who became famous back in late 80s for his fight (including military methods) against the independence of the Baltic countries. Since that time he constantly and invariably represented so called “patriotic” (effectively meaning “imperial”) parties and forces in Russian politics. In his own words, his way of thinking was always imperial, and he always regrets about the empire he lost (USSR). Of course, most of the information about that person is in Russian, but still he is reasonably well described in Wikipedia.

These days, Col. Alksnis founded a movement for the creation of “National OS”. This is entirely within his patriotic political line. Once he discovered that GNU/Linux is free and available to anyone for modification and improvements (BTW initially Linux was not the only candidate), he evidently decided it would be a good idea to become a political leader and political face of Free Software in Russia. This is despite the fact there are companies and people in Russia who are involved into OSS for years and made huge contributions by code and real working projects.

The ideas of “National OS” are about patriotism, economical value and economical independence or Russia, rather than about freedom of software. The freedom is just a property of the software. That property provides “National OS” with the qualities it needs. That is where my main concern lies - Col Alksnis does not really share the ideas of FSF, he obuses them to implement his political agenda.

I am absolutely confident that a visit of RMS into Russia would be a great event, very useful for FOSS movement in our country, attracting a lot of attention and helping our communities. But I have serious doubts the company of Viktor Alksnis would be beneficial for the public view of such visit, RMS and FSF in general. There are many people (especially liberally-oriented intellectuals) who already have their brows highly raised while talking about that strange “friendship”. If RMS is really interested in getting into our big country, I’d strongly recommend him to deal only with the people who’ve already proved their commitment to the ideas of FOSS. For example, the companies which promote Linux for years (and which recently formed the Linux alliance). There are also universities which could organize invitations, there are computer-related media companies. I could help getting contacts, names etc (for the record, I am not affiliated with any of these companies:) That would be the proper company for RMS in Moscow, St.Petersburg and other parts of Russia. But please beware of Russian internal politics and politicians…

I hope that somehow the information I provided here would reach the eyes/ears of RMS and FSF - and they would think about it all.

Ruby, part2

Thanks to Ubuntu, Ruby 1.9 is available in Gutsy. And I still cannot find the way (the letter:) to unpack UTF-16. Should I wait for Ruby 4 for UTF-16 support (necessary for proper handling of id3 tags)?

And I am really happy to see ruby packaged for Maemon (now - with GNOME and Hildon, hurray!)

PS And lads thanks for mentioning KCODE - at least handling of UTF-8 is bearable.

Ruby: disappointment of the year :(

Heard a lot about Ruby. Read some articles etc. Got deeply impressed by that really nice language. Yesterday, tried it on my small personal project - and now I am crying aloud. No native support for UTF-8 strings (well, I mean stable 1.8, not some development branch). I  still wonder how it could happen that the language with that kind of problem can even be considered as mainstream in 2007?