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Hans Reiser

According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle Hans Reiser pled “not guilty” to the charge of murdering his wife. This isn’t particularly exciting news as all previous indications were that he was going to do so.

However one noteworthy fact from the article is that they are setting up an education fund for […]

when you can’t get along with other developers

Many years ago I was involved in a free software development project with write access to the source tree. For reasons that are not relevant to this post (and which I hope all the participants would regard as trivial after so much time has passed) I had a disagreement with one of the more senior […]

Supporting an Election Campaign

Yesterday I handed out “how to vote” cards for the Greens at the state election. It did seem to be a significant waste to have so much paper produced. Slightly more than half the voters who visited my polling booth took cards from all parties, which was obviously of little use. There is some useful […]

Linux support by politicians

In two days time we are having a state election in Victoria (Australia). For this election there is only one party with policies that are positive towards free software, that is the Australian Greens. The policy documents include an IT policy (note that the IT policy is on a link that may change while the […]

nuclear power in Australia

From Crikey: If a government wanted to figure out how best to defend the country, it wouldn’t hold an inquiry into the air force. It would hold an inquiry into … defence. So if a government wanted to figure out how to plan for responsible energy consumption in an age of climate change you’d assume […]

biometrics and passwords

In a comment on my post more about securing an office someone suggested using biometrics. The positive aspect of biometrics is that they can’t be lost, no-one is accidentally going to leave a finger or an eye in their car while they go to a party while other authentication devices are regularly lost in such […]

economics of a computer store (why they don’t stock what you want)

In some mailing list discussions recently some people demonstrated a lack of knowledge of the economics of a shop. Having run a shop for a few years (an Internet Cafe) I have some practical knowledge of this. I will focus on small businesses in this article, but the same economic principles apply to large […]

more about securing an office

My post about securing an office received many comments, so many that I had to write another blog entry to respond to them and also add some other things I didn’t think of before.

One suggestion was to use pam_usb to store passwords on a USB device. It sounds like it’s worth considering, but really […]

flash for main storage

I was in a discussion about flash on a closed mailing list, so I’ll post my comments here.

I believe that flash will soon be suitable for main storage on most desktop and laptop machines (which means replacing the vast majority of the hard drive market). Flash survives mechanical wear much better than hard drives […]

a good security design for an office

One issue that is rarely considered is how to deal with office break-ins for the purpose of espionage. I believe that this issue has been solved reasonably well for military systems, but many of the military solutions do not apply well to civilian systems – particularly the use of scary dudes with guns. Also […]