I will do another post later with the sources[esc]bdwapattern of the skirt (the shirtwaist is adapted from a commercial pattern) and more details, but this is the outfit I wore at Lucca Comics this year.

And this post is completely SFW *even* in an Edwardian workplace!

As the libreboot website warns: there are issues with virtualization on x200 without microcode updated.

Virtualization is something that I use, and I have a number of VMs on that laptop, managed with libvirt; since it has microcode version 1067a, I decided to try and see if I was being lucky and virtualization was working anyway.

The result is that the machines no longer start: the kernel loads, and then it crashes and reboots. I don't remember why, however, I tried to start a debian installer CD (iso) I had around, and that one worked.

So, I decided to investigate a bit more: apparently a new installation done from that iso (debian-8.3.0-amd64-i386-netinst.iso) boots and works with no problem, while my (older, I suspect) installations don't. I tried to boot one of the older VMs with that image in recovery mode, tried to chroot in the original root and got failed to run command '/bin/bash': Exec format error.

Since that shell was lacking even the file command, I tried then to start a live image, and choose the lightweight debian-live-8.0.0-amd64-standard.iso: that one didn't start in the same way as the existing images.

Another try with debian-live-8.5.0-i386-lxde-desktop.iso confirmed that apparently Debian > 8.3 works, Debian 8.0 doesn't (I don't have ISOs for versions 8.1 and 8.2 to bisect properly the issue).

I've skimmed the release notes for 8.3 and noticed that there was an update in the intel-microcode package, but AFAIK the installer doesn't have anything from non-free, and I'm sure that non-free wasn't enabled on the VMs.

My next attempt (thanks tosky on #debian-it for suggesting this obvious solution that I was missing :) ) was to run one of the VMs with plain qemu instead of kvm and bring it up-to-date: the upgrade was successful and included the packages in this screenshot, but on reboot it's still not working as before.

Right now, I think I will just recreate from scratch the images I need, but when I'll have time I'd like to investigate the issue a bit more, so hopefully there will be a part 2 to this article.

found on teh interwebz, no idea where it comes from (if you do, please tell me in the comments)

edit: it was as easy as actually opening imgur with javascript on: the source is brendangregg.com/linuxperf.htm…

@Gruppo Linux Como

Since apparently only the Belgians can have nice things, yesterday made myself a couple of notebooks with removable sheets.

Advantages:

* does not require a trip to Belgium¹.
* Respects one international standard (ISO 838), and the sheets can be stored in a regular binder after I'm done writing them.
* I've had fun making them.

Disadvantages:

* Adding and removing sheets is easy, but not as easy as the real thing.

The .scad file for the rings is quite trivial, but if there are requests I can publish it somewhere.

¹ yes, I know that the website lists distributors for my country, but I've never seen it sold anywhere.

With Debconf being in South Africa, a lot of people (like me) probably weren't able to attend and are missing the cheese and wine party, mao games and general socialization that is happening there.

One thing we don't have to miss, however, are the talks: as usual the video team is doing a great job recording and streaming all talks so that people can still participate a bit from their home.

What they do, however, requires a lot of manpower, so if you are attending Debconf please consider volunteering to help: from my experience last year they are very nice people who are welcoming towards new contributors and they have periodical training sessions to help people getting started with the various tasks. More informations about video team meetings and training session are in the topic of the IRC channel, #debconf-video@OFTC.

I don't think there are cookies involved (which just proves that the video team isn't evil), but you may get a t-shirt and you will get a warm fuzzy feeling of having helped people around the world.

@Debian #debconf

About one year ago, during my first Debconf, I've felt the need for some way to tell people whether I was busy on my laptop doing stuff that required concentration or just passing some time between talks etc. and available for interruptions, socialization or context switches.

One easily available method of course would have been to ping me on IRC (and then probably go on chatting on it while being in the same room, of course :) ), but I wanted to try something that allowed for less planning and worked even in places with less connectivity.

My first idea was a base laptop sticker with two statuses and then a removable one used to cover the wrong status and point to the correct one, and I still think it would be nice, but having it printed is probably going to be somewhat expensive, so I shelved the project for the time being.

Lately, however, I've been playing with hexagonal stickers and decided to design something on this topic, whith the result in the figure above, with the “hacking” sticker being my first choice, and the “concentrating” alternative probably useful while surrounded by people who may misunderstand the term “hacking”.

While idly looking around for sticker printing prices I realized that it didn't necessarly have to be a sticker and started to consider alternatives.

One format I'm trying is inspired by "do not disturb" door signs: I've used some laminating pouches I already had around which are slightly bigger than credit-card format (but credit-card size would also work of course ) and cut a notch so that they can be attached to the open lid of a laptop.

They seem to fit well on my laptop lid, and apart from a bad tendency to attract every bit of lint in a radius of a few meters the form factor looks good. I'll try to use them at the next conference to see if they actually work for their intended purpose.

SVG sources (and a PDF) are available on my website under the CC-BY-SA license.

This evening I've played around a bit with the Sticker Constructor Specification and its template, and this is the result:

Now I just have to:

* find somebody in Europe who prints good stickers and doesn't require illustrator (or other proprietary software) to submit files for non-rectangular shapes
* find out which Debian team I should contact to submit the files so that they can be used by everybody interested.

But neither will happen today, nor probably tomorrow, because lazy O:-)

Edit: now that I'm awake I realized I forgot to thank @Enrico Zini Zini and MadameZou for their help in combining my two proposals in a better design.

Source svg

Yesterday I've finally donated to become a Conservancy Supporter.

The reasons to donate have already been explained many times both on Planet Debian and elsewhere; a few weeks ago I wrote a post (in Italian) on the Ninux community blog to spread the word about it.

So, why I haven't donated earlier?

Trying to donate via PayPal from Italy (and, it seems, from Europe in general) requires a PayPal account, which I don't have and don't want to have, so I contacted them to ask for bank transfer instructions.
The first instructions I received were too complex for my online-only bank account, so I asked my bank for help, there was an exchange of emails, further simpler instructions from their bank, a small donation to test everything and time passed.

Finally, the good news: it is possible to donate to Conservancy from Italy (and probably from elsewhere in EU) using a SEPA transfer with minimal commissions and usually available from the home banking websites, so that it doesn't require significantly more effort than using paypal.
You can contact Conservancy via e-mail to get the relevant payment data.

(Conservancy has an account in EUR which is then used to pay for expenses in EUR, so no currency conversion commission are involved.)

The default behaviour of ssh in debian testing has changed a bit: now it uses ECDSA and shows SHA256 fingerprints by default instead of using RSA and showing MD5 fingerprints.

Of course, most listings of host fingerprints still only show MD5 fingerprints for an RSA key.

This is a way to ask a server for its keys and print their fingerprints, allowing some crosscheck.

$ ssh-keyscan -t rsa,ecdsa $SERVER > keys.pub && ssh-keygen -lf keys.pub -E md5
$ # check the results against the published listing
$ ssh-keygen -lf keys.pub

I can think of an attack on this: somebody could intercept the communication, send you the right RSA pubkey and their own ECDSA, and then redirect the communication toward their own host.

Relevant links:

permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linu…
bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2011/0…
enricozini.org/2008/tips/ssh-h…

(Post title courtesy of @Enrico Zini )

I've decided I don't want to keep an ssh key on my traveling laptop, but I still need to be able to authenticate to a number of hosts (and expecially gpg repositories). I also have an OpenPGP smartcard (from the FSFE). A plan is starting to form.

There are a number of guides available, but many of those are obsolete; the following pages are from this decade:

• Using GnuPG (2.1) for SSH authentication
• Using GnuPG for SSH authentication (from the same author, using GnuPG 2.0, includess still current notes on using a smartcard)
• How to use authentication subkeys in gpg for SSH public key authentication
• SSH authentication with your PGP key

I've had some success from outside X, now I need to find out where I should disable ssh-agent from starting every time a start an X session, so that gpg-agent can take its place.

@Gruppo Linux Como @LIFO #gnupg

Quest'anno all'ESC c'è stato un lieve maltempo (eufemismo), ma questa ne è stata la conseguenza :)

Alla fine dell'arcobaleno c'era un pentolone, e credo che a quell'ora fosse già pieno di gnocchi.

To be sure not to waste time during a ksp to meet people with whom I have already exchanged fingerprints, I decided to do a quick check of the list.

I had already downloaded a recent wotsap db to ~/.wotsapdb;

$ wotsap $MY_KEY > signatures.txt

I've then edited the file, keeping just the signature sections:

This key is signed by, excluding cross-signatures:
[...]
This key is cross-signed with:
[...]
Keys signed by this key, excluding cross-signatures:
[...]

And then grepped the keys in the kps file in that list (maybe doing the reverse would have been better, whatever)

$ for K in `grep "^pub" ksp-dc15.txt | cut -c 15-22 ` ; do grep $K signatures.txt ; done

The first characters on each line tells you if it is a cross signature (X,X), if you have signed the key (-,X) or if they have signed your key (X,-), so that you can mark them on the ksp list as "ignore", "ask if there were problems with your fingerprint / ID", "ask whether they have received your signatures" as relevant.

I only had a few results, so the next step was done by hand.

Let us image I have a reason to print a text file that is 2965 lines long, is encoded in utf-8 (so a2ps and enscript don't work) and I don't want to destroy a whole forest for it.

I've started by using xelatex to get a nicely typeset A5 page with my file in a monospaced font: partecipants.tex

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[left=1cm,right=1cm,top=0.8cm,bottom=1cm,foot=0.2cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{listings}

\lstset{ %
  basicstyle=\ttfamily\scriptsize,
  frame=none,
  keepspaces=true,
}

\begin{document}
\lstinputlisting{ksp-dc15.txt}
\end{document}

This gets compiled into partecipants.pdf with

$ xelatex partecipants.tex

And resulted in 44 pages, 4 less than the 48 needed by a2ps, and printable on just 11 A4 sheets.

I wanted it to be easily manageable while walking around, taking notes into it while standing, so I decided to arrange it in booklet form:

$ pdfbook partecipants.pdf

The result, partecipants-book.pdf was printed (two sided, of course) folded and stitched in the middle.

I could have arranged it into signatures, but this would have required an additional sheet to bring the number of pages to a multiple of 16.

I know that there are electronic alternatives around, and I've also considered just carrying around the file and adding notes (to a copy?) with vim, but I'd trust a paper copy more.

Yesterday, both the FSF and Conservancy announced that Canonical, Ltd. changed their Intellectual property rights policy in such a way that they no longer violate the GPL as it used to.

There are a number of personal comments on the matter by people involved in the case: Bradley M. Kuhn, Matthew Garrett and Jonathan Riddell; the TL;DR is that now the situation is fine from a legal point of view, and it has been solved in a shorter time than usual (just two years! speaking of lowered expectations...), but Canonical is still applying restrictions to non-GPL code that are out of place from a Free Software respecting entity.

This made me wonder about the hordes of tiny ubuntu derivatives out there, which are probably too small to attract attention and risk consequences, but are probably not in compliance with Canonical's policies. Should they rebase themselves on Debian, giving their trust to a community who believes in Free Software instead of a company with different priorities?

Should they start contributing upstream to Debian, and turn themselves into Debian Pure Blends? YES, but this is a different and wider matter :)

Not worn for obvious reasons, but my first pair of split drawers, with a pattern inspired by a number of start-of-century manuals found on archive.org, but adapted to a more modern method.

These were made from an old bedsheet (and they show it, including bleach stains on the side not seen on the pictures), and I have to enlarge them a bit, but they are already wearable.

Detailed instructions to draft the pattern will be available... when ready (probably before the next debian stable release, probably) :)

Lately I have been sewing a bit and since "daguerrotype or it didn't happen", this is a picture of me wearing mostly underwear :)

A couple of days ago this appeared in my system logs

Mar 31 23:59:59  kernel: Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

my first reaction of course was "great! they gave us one second more of sleep! MY PRECIOUSSSS", but then I realized that yes, this year there was supposed to be a leap second, but it should have been in June, not in March.

Other people I know noticed the message, but nobody knew anything else about it, and duckduckgoing didn't find anything, so I'm asking the lazyweb: does anybody know what happened?

Update: it seems that this has been traced to a single layer1 ntp server.

Anche quest'anno si terrà la DUCC-IT, Debian Ubuntu Community Conference Italia: quarta edizione che si terrà a Milano Lambrate sabato 23 e domenica 24 maggio presso il TIM WCAP Accelerator di via Rombon 52.

È aperta la call for paper e chi vuole aiutare nell'organizzazione è il benvenuto, ma soprattutto partecipate: è un'ottima occasione per incontrare un po' tutto il mondo del Software Libero in Italia.

Tutte le info sul sito ufficiale: ducc.it/

@Debian @LIFO @Gruppo Linux Como

Tonight I've dreamt I was in some kind of computer store and somebody told me that I should always save a copy of my work, as a backup.

I looked at him thinking "you really want to talk about this subject", by SO looked at me as if thinking "oh, no! she's starting!" and then I went into full vcs-home evangelist mode.

I may have just a bit of a problem :)

Yesterday I missed a query from a friend (with the answer to a question *I* had asked in the first place) because it ended up in window 30-something and my statusbar was full of dim numbers from channels where people had just joined/left.

This morning I've set
activity_hide_level = JOINS PARTS QUITS
and my world is a much neater place :)

(I may have to add NICKS and possibly MODES, but they are rare enough and I'm still not sure I don't care about them, especially the latter.)

I've eventually decided to donate to the current MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign

I do hope that they will make it to the next unlock level (Aveyah), or at least that they get close enough (with the matching grant this looks feasible) that they decide to work on most of the features.