OSSPACK

It’s 3 AM, GUADEC is big fun as usual, I’m in the hotel lobby, and as I have only seen one summary blogpost on planet.gnome.org yet I’d like to mention that GNOME 3.0 will be released in March 2011.

Good night.

BLUA stands for Bangladesh Linux Users Alliance, a LUG formed in 2002 primarily to promote the use of GNU/Linux in the country. We’ve come a long way, and today we officially represent Ubuntu and Fedora in Bangladesh as well as working as the local affiliate of Creative Commons.

We’ve started working on to give a complete face-lift to our website, and as a part of it we’ve come up with a new logo for our organisation. Since this blog post will get aggregated on Planet Ubuntu and Planet Fedora, I’d like to take this opportunity to get feedbacks about the logo from all of you. There are some brilliant graphic designers in our community and I’ll sure with all of your inputs we can improve the logo! Please let me know what you honestly think about it, we’ll take all your comments and suggestions in account.

The logo was created by Adnan Quaium using Inkscape, and the font used comes with a “free for commercial use” license.

This week’s update brings:

TestDrive GTK Front-end

• Minor bugfixes and UI Improvements.
• Support to work with ISOs on the Ubuntu Releases repo (http://releases.ubuntu.com)
• Other ISOs: Add list to UI, to display all the available Other ISO’s. Thanks to this, there’s also support to delete ISO’s in the list.
• Preferences: Improve selection of Ubuntu Release, as well as be able to select Repository from which to Obtain the ISOs.

Unfortunately, these new changes are not yet available in the PPA given that I’m merging the TestDrive Front-end source with TestDrive’s source and new packages will become available in the next couple days to start the Testing, in preparation to the upload to Maverick. So, stay tuned.

I guess we all have the challenge of how to easily get a link or a phone number or some other strings of data from the computer to the mobile phone.

With the help of mobile barcodes and klipper, this is now possible in KDE Trunk to do easily. Place some data in clipboard, click on klipper and select Show barcode.

To read it, open the barcode app in your phone (mBarcode on n900 for example) and point it to your monitor.

I am happy to announce that my presentation proposal for SMB Traffic Analyzer got accepted for the Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. And yes, there is reason to celebrate, because it’s not like my proposal was the only one the jury took into account. They have a lot of presentation suggestions to choose from. Flight is booked, California here I come

Meanwhile, the SMBTA team is working on a first release, and we hope we have realtime monitoring ready for demoing on SDC. Stay tuned !

Today was the first day of the main GUADEC conference and this meant that it was extra busy at the registration desk with many people checking in today. The day was marked by great talks, the first occurrence of WebM streaming for any event and the arrival of some more t-shirts.

I almost overslept this morning because I had worked until 3.40 in the night to make the streaming on the website ready for the first day of streaming. Fortunately Mart was there to wake me up and we made it to the venue just before eight o’ clock, in time.

Almost straight away the first attendees started to arrive and some of them still had to register. There are still some people not registered. We would ask them all to register still, so we can provide them with the necessary information and swag, but also for the municipality of The Hague, which sponsors us for every foreign attendee we have registered. (That is also why bringing the ticket is so important.)

I spent the morning trying to awaken a bit more, doing the regular tidying up, moving stuff, searching for and talking to people, answering questions and looking after the website. The afternoon I spent manning the camera of the Video Live Stream 1, in ‘Paris’, which gave me the opportunity to listen to some talks. I really liked the provocative humour of the ‘State of GNOME’ talk. No patronising, religion doesn’t need any more protection than other fantasies.
That was actually my day. Time does go quickly, but it seems a lot quicker when you’re writing about days you do loads of small things.

T-shirts
Yes, again t-shirts problems. We had hoped to have solved the t-shirt problems today, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to do so. Summary of today’s progress:

• There are no separate speakers’ shirt, they get a regular conference shirt;
• We have run out of men’s M, L and XL definitely;
• Tomorrow we will, at long last, have the women’s sizes and the volunteer shirts;
• Leftovers of the volunteer shirts, if any, will be handed out to the other people still waiting for their shirt;
• Unfortunately the logo of one of our sponsors, Igalia, is still missing from the t-shirts, after the company we ordered the shirts managed to get the logo dropped from the complete template we provided.

Network
The network isn’t using VPN or any other kind of tunnelling after all, as far as I’m aware. Instead we’re using Google’s public DNS servers. Privacy pundits might not be happy with this, but then privacy pundits would be very stupid privacy pundits if they wouldn’t be using their own tunnel at conferences anyway.

The scenario is,

i have created a pdf file for my personal document, and then to make it safe i put a password so anyone else cant read the file except myself.

After a month later, I've forgot the password but i want to read the file as soon as possible.

here it comes, pdfcrack! ( also available on win32 )


Mission: recover the password
target: piju.pdf's password
weapon: pdfcrack http://pdfcrack.sourceforge.net/
estimation time: depends on the length of the password
situation reports: no text, just photos

In my earlier post I wrote about an effort to get the CACert root certificates licensed under the CC-BY-ND. It took about a month to come to a conclusion, the policy group stopped the CC-BY-ND effort and came up with an own special license which suits their need of (no) reliance for alien parties. The new RDL (root distribution license) is in the status DRAFT and thus, by CACerts policies put into force. It will become the POLICY status in another month of waiting. According to RedHat legal department, the new CACert RDL “is Free and GPL Compatible”.

Dear distributors, please feel free and engage your derivates and start including CACert root certificates.

new RDL: https://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/Policies/Agreements/RootDistributionLicense.html
Mailinglist post: https://lists.cacert.org/wws/arc/cacert-policy/2010-07/msg00144.html

Distribute the CACert root certificates: Class 1, Class 3

Traveling always comes with risks. Aside from the risks you may encounter along the way, there are the worries of what you left behind. Will the house burn down? Will the mail pile up, signalling to thieves that the home is empty? Will the server stay up? On a more prosaic note ... Will the plants in the garden all die from lack of water?

Shortly before traveling to Oregon for OSCON, I acquired a cute little Cape Gooseberry seedling (courtesy of Mark Terranova at the south bay Geeknic). That's a new plant to me -- I'd never seen one before. But it was a cute little thing, and seemed to be flourishing. I had it in a pot on a little shelf where it would get morning sun but wouldn't get too hot in the afternoon, and was looking forward to planting it when it got big enough to withstand our marauding local seedling-loving snails.

To get it through my planned week-and-a-half absence, I had one of those glass watering bulbs they sell in drugstores. They're supposed to last several weeks, though they don't work that reliably in practice. Still, I saturated the soil with water the morning I left, then filled the bulb and crossed my fingers for no long heat waves.

I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I got back. Something had dug out my little gooseberry and taken it!

I still have no idea what got it. We certainly have some local squirrels who love to dig, and young squirrels (still learning their digging skills) love potted plants. But I wouldn't think a squirrel would have much use for a gooseberry seedling -- they just like the act of digging.

I wonder if cape gooseberry leaves are particularly tasty to rodents?

Ironically, the soil was still quite damp. The little plant probably would have made it through just fine.