I'm playing with btrfs to get a feel for what's coming up in linux filesystems. To be daring, i've configured a test machine using only btrfs for its on-disk filesystems. I really like some of the ideas put forward in the btrfs design. (i'm aware that btrfs is considered experimental-only …
Articles by Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg)
Please use unambiguous tag names in your DVCS
One of the nice features of a distributed version control system (DVCS) like
gitis the ability to tag specific states of your project, and to cryptographically sign your tags.Many projects use simple tag names with the version string like "
0.35". This is a plea to ensure that …test-driven development: refactoring, difficulties
liw recently wrote about test-driven development:
This all sounds like a lot of bureaucratic nonsense, but what I get out of this is this: once all tests pass, I have a strong confidence that the software works. As soon as I've added all the features I want to have for …
USAA Deposit@Home: bad engineering and terrible UX
I use USAA for some of my finances. They specialize in remote banking (i've never been in a physical branch). Sadly, they can still be pretty clueless about how to use the web properly. My latest frustration with them was trying to use their Deposit@Home service, where you scan …
The bleeding edge: systemd
Curious about these shiny new things i keep hearing about, i set up a test desktop system using using systemd as the init system (yes, that means using systemd-sysv in place of sysvinit -- so i had to remove an essential package for this to work).
A system-crippling bug was naturally …
EDAC i5000 non-fatal errors
I've got a Debian GNU/Linux lenny installation (2.6.26-2-vserver-amd64 kernel) running on a Dell Poweredge 2950 with BIOS 2.0.1 (2007-10-27).
It has two
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5160 @ 3.00GHzprocessors (according to/proc/cpuinfo, 8 1GiB 667MHz DDR2 ECC modules (part numberHYMP512F72CP8N3-Y5), according …Debian on Thecus N8800Pro
I recently set up debian on a Thecus N8800Pro. It seems to be a decent rackmount 2U chassis with 8 3.5" hot-swap SATA drives, dual gigabit NICs, a standard DB9 RS-232 serial port, one eSATA port, a bunch of USB 2.0 connectors, and dual power supplies. I'm happy …
auto-built debirf images
jrollinsand i recently did a bunch of cleanup work on debirf, with the result that debirf 0.30 can now build all the shipped example profiles without error (well, as long asdebootstrap --variant=fakechrootis working properly -- apprently that's not the case for fakechroot 2.9 in squeeze …CryptLib and the OpenSSL License
I spent part of today looking at packaging Peter Gutmann's CryptLib for debian. My conclusion: it may not be worth my time.
One of the main reasons i wanted to package it for debian is because i would like to see more OpenPGP-compliant free software available to debian users …
PHP, MySQL, and SSL?
Is there a way to access a MySQL database over the network from PHP and be confident that
- the connection is actually using SSL, and
- the server's X.509 certificate was successfully verified?
As far as i can tell, when using the stock MySQL bindings, setting MYSQL_CLIENT_SSL is purely advisory …