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The Debian project is afflicted with several damaging memes. One that is causing problems at the moment is the idea that life should be fair. Unfortunately life is inherently unfair, it’s not fair that those of us who were born in first-world countries (the majority of Debian developers) have so many more opportunities [...]

While reading the discussion of Vista security on Bruce Schneier’s blog it occurred to me that comparing the issues of DRM that face MS with the issues faced by SE Linux developers provides some benefits.
SE Linux is designed to enable the owner of a computer to effectively enforce security policies to protect their system integrity [...]

Andre Pang blogs about the annoyance of email disclaimers. For a while I had a .sig indicating that it was a condition of sending email to me that the sender agrees to legalistic terms in their .sig being inapplicable to me.
220 smtp.sws.net.au ESMTP Postfix - by sending email to this server you agree that [...]

Inspired by Julien Goodwin’s post I created a new blog for myself named Source Dump. Source is different to other blog content in that updates to fix bugs may be required (generally I believe that ideally blog posts should not be edited once published and in the rare cases of editing being necessary all [...]

Adam Rosi-Kessel made an interesting post about They Might Be Giants producing children’s music because their original fan base are now old enough to have children.
From casual inspection of the crowds at events such as Linux Conf AU it seems to me that many serious Linux people are also at the right age to have [...]

From a suggestion on my previous blog entry I decided to test out google reader.
The first problem was that it caused Konqueror to SEGV in etch, I filed a bug report and switched to Firefox.
Next to add my feeds I had to either export them in OPML format or add them one at a time, [...]

I just noticed that /usr/bin/planetplanet is using about 120M of RAM. This isn’t currently a problem as I’m running it on a machine with 256M of RAM, however I would like to run my web server on a 96M Xen instance. 120M for planetplanet is probably going to cause bad performance on a [...]

Chris Samual writes a good summary of Peter Gutmann’s analysis of the cost of Vista (in terms of DRM).
The following paragraph in the article however seemed more interesting to me:
Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease [...]

I’ve just been trying to set up a MythTV system, I’ve had the hardware for this for a while but until my TV broke I hadn’t found the time to work on it.
My planned hardware was a P3 system for both frontend and backend. However the Debian MythTV packages take over 250M of memory [...]

A few days ago I installed Debian/Etch on my Thinkpad. One of the reasons for converting from Fedora to Debian is that I need to run Xen and Fedora doesn’t support non-PAE machines with Xen. Ironically it’s hardware supplied to me by Red Hat (Thinkpad T41p) that is lacks PAE support and forces [...]