Uwe Hermann

My blog is now syndicated with Planet Debian, a group blog which aggregates lots of blogs of Debian Developers.

I have uploaded my paper AntiPatterns — Theory and Practice (PDF) today. I wrote this as accompanying paper for a talk about AntiPatterns I gave in late 2004 at the Technical University of Munich.

The paper is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License, so you are free to redistribute and modify it, as long as you obey the terms of the license.

There are not too many updates here as of late. I'm busy playing Wesnoth, trying out a few MUDs (especially Aardwolf, which seems to be really nice), coding my own game Holsham Traders (a first release should be out in one or two weeks) and lots and lots of other more seriuos work...

I have just uploaded fw_laptop, the firewall script I use to secure my laptop and/or desktop machines (but not my servers), in the Security section of my homepage. The script is GPL'ed and work in progress. I'm happy to receive feedback and/or corrections and suggestions regarding the script.

I will publish other similar scripts for different purposes when time permits.

So from 2007 onwards The Man™ wants all Germans to pay "Internet-Rundfunkgebühr" (a fee which one was forced to pay if one owned a TV or radio. Now it suffices to own a computer which can be connected to the Internet).

(via Telepolis)

Linux 2.6.11.10 has been released, which fixes two locally exploitable security issues. Another similar bug has been fixed recently by 2.6.11.9.
Every Linux box with local users should be upgraded ASAP. My laptop is already compiling away happily (although I'm the only one who has an account on it of course, but you never know)...

(via Heise)

As some of you might have noticed, I started to sign all my emails with my GPG key a few days ago. I knew for quite a while that this is a good practice, but I just didn't get around to actually do it. Until now.

Technically, I simply added set pgp_autosign to my .muttrc, and that's it. Now mutt asks me for my passphrase upon every email I try to send and then signs it.

So... if you should receive any funny email from "me" somewhen and it's not signed, it's most probably not an email from me but either someone trying to fuck with me, spam, a virus, a trojan, a phishing mail or any other scum you can imagine.

Hm, how about writing server passwords on a whiteboard and then releasing marketing brochures with photos of that whiteboard? Great idea...

(via A Day in the Life of an Information Security Investigator)

SELFHTML is a very popular German (X)HTML reference and tutorial which also covers CSS, JavaScript and related technologies.
Today, I have updated the SELFHTML Debian package to the new upstream version 8.1 (I'm the Debian maintainer of the SELFHTML package).
It's probably too late for the upcoming sarge release, but at least the package is now available for those who use unstable (and testing, soon).

I have updated my .vimrc quite a lot recently and I uploaded the new version today.

The file is well-documented (IMHO at least) and contains some very handy abbreviations, short-cuts, typo-fixes and miscellaneous configuration settings which I deem very important for effective text editing. On every new Unix/Linux account I first download my vimrc (as well as my .bashrc, and my .muttrc) from my homepage to have a somewhat sane working environment...

Note: The .bashrc and .muttrc files are quite outdated at the moment, but I intend to update them soon, too. I'll announce the new versions on my config-files page.

Jamie Zawinski, former Netscape employee and later Mozilla hacker, has a nice list of "outtakes" from the Netscape 3.x/4.x source code, i.e., code comments which were removed before the Netscape code was released and then became Mozilla. Makes an interesting read.

Someone seems to hate George Lucas.

MediaWiki 1.5alpha1, the first unstable release of the 1.5 series of the software that runs WikiPedia, is out.

There's some important release notes there:

** WARNING: USE OF THIS ALPHA RELEASE MAY INFEST YOUR HOUSE WITH **
** TERMITES, ROT YOUR TEETH, GROW HAIR ON YOUR PALMS, AND PASTE **
** INNUENDO INTO YOUR C.V. RIGHT BEFORE A JOB INTERVIEW! **
** DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU, MAN. WE TOTALLY DID RIGHT HERE. **

Oleg Popov has recently started a new wiki called WiKi4All, which aims to be a catalog of wikis, where all existing wikis are listed in certain categories.
He's actively visiting loads of wikis and leaving a message for the maintainer to add his/her wiki to WiKi4All. I have already added Unmaintained Free Software there, and Crazy Hacks and Holsham Traders will follow soon.

Holsham Traders, by the way, is a realtime multiplayer trading game written in Ruby, which I'm currently developing (more on that later).

I'm happy to announce that my (German) Drupal article has now been translated (not by me) and will be published tomorrow in Issue 55 of the (English) Linux Magazine.

It doesn't appear to be available online, unfortunately.

Mark Burnett poses an interesting question in his SecurityFocus article Security for the Paranoid:

Is it time to worry when security professionals consider you too paranoid?

I consider myself quite security-aware (or paranoid, as you like), too, but some of Mark Burnett's measures are really quite extreme. For example:

I require my kids to use at least 14 character passwords on our home network and I'm considering issuing them smart cards. [...] I don't just throw out shredded documents; I spread the shredded bits into my garden to use as mulch.

However, I really agree with him on this issue: "There's no need to analyze the threat of every situation. Just practice strong security always and you should be okay". I couldn't have said this any better.

WIR SIND PAPST!

In English: "WE ARE POPE!". This is the headline which could be seen one day after the papal election in the (German) tabloid daily newspaper Bild-Zeitung (similar in style and quality to The Sun).

BILDblog (a blog which watches and criticizes the newspaper, very satiric, very funny) has an image of the headline — a must-see. I saw the headline when walking by a "newspaper-stand" (no idea how this is called in English) on my way to a subway station here in Munich and nearly laughed my ass off.

Update: Someone is collecting "WIR SIND PAPST!" images...

Professor Jasper Rine from the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley had some interesting words for the guy who stole his laptop recently. At the end of a lecture, which was recorded and is now — thanks to Boing Boing — available in many formats (Real, Quicktime and MP3), he told the guy (who was presumely in the class and was apparently after the exam data) what consequences he is about to face.

There's a text transcript of the last part of the lecture, which (among other stuff) says:

I am tied up all this afternoon; I am out of town all of next week. You have until 11:55 to return the computer, and whatever copies you've made, to my office, because I'm the only hope you've got of staying out of deeper trouble than you or any student I've ever known has ever been in.

There's lots of discussion going on right now about this. One reader of Joe Grossberg's blog is a bit sceptic (to say the least) that all of what the prof said is true, but still, I'm sure this scared the shit out of the guy who stole the laptop...

(via Boing Boing)

I was at the Alanis Morissette live concert in Munich last Friday (April 15, 2005). The show was pretty good, and I took a few photos which I uploaded to the German Wikipedia. I'll add the images to the English Wikipedia, too, if noone beats me to it.

The images are licensed under the terms of the GFDL, of course.

Bram Moolenaar, main author of vim, has written (quite some time ago) a very useful article which shows some good ways to use your favorite editor (vim, of course, but most of the tips also apply to other editors) more efficiently.

Besides the generic tips and tricks of text editing, the article also mentions some specific vim commands, e.g. CTRL-N (word completion), % (match braces), :abbr (prevent typos), and many more.

Oh, and if that's not enough for you, check out a few hundred vim tips over at vim.org.

(via Kenneth Hunt and chromatic)