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Release Dates for Debian

Mark Shuttleworth has written an interesting post about Ubuntu release dates [1]. He claims that free software distributions are better able to meet release dates than proprietary OSs because they are not doing upstream development. The evidence that free software distributions generally do a reasonable job of meeting release dates (and Ubuntu does an excellent […]

The Purpose of Planet Debian

An issue that causes ongoing discussion is what is the purpose of a Planet installation such as Planet Debian [1]. The discussion usually seems to take the less effective form of what is “appropriate” content for the Planet or what is considered to be “abuse” of the Planet. Of course it’s impossible to get anything […]

Preparing for a Collapse

Rick Falkvinge (leader of the Swedish Pirate Party) has written his predictions about an economic crash in the US [1]. Predicting that the US economy will crash is no great stretch, it’s gross failures seem obvious. The Pirate Party [2] is a one-issue political party that is based on reform of intellectual property laws. It […]

Software Development is a Team Sport

Albert writes about software development and how much teamwork is used [1]. He makes an interesting clash of analogies by suggesting that it’s not a “team sport” because “its not like commercial fishing where many hands are used to pull in the net at the same time“.

I think that software development for any non-trivial […]

Trust and My SE Linux Play Machine

When discussing the machine there are two common comments I get. One is a suggestion that I am putting myself at risk, I think that the risk of visiting random web sites is significantly greater. Another is a challenge to put the machine on my internal network if I really trust SE Linux, as noted I have made mistakes in the past and there have been Linux kernel bugs – but apart from that it’s always best to have multiple layers of protection. […]

SE Linux Play Machine and Passwords

My SE Linux Play Machine has been online again since the 18th of March. On Monday the 11th of Feb I took it offline after a user managed to change the password for my own account. Part of the problem was the way /bin/passwd determines whether it should change a password. […]

Redirecting Output from a Running Process

Someone asked on a mailing list how to redirect output from a running process. They had a program which had been running for a long period of time without having stdout redirected to a file. They wanted to logout (to move the laptop that was used for the ssh session) but not kill the process […]

Laptop vs Book Weight

Matt Bottrell wrote an interesting and informative post about laptops for school kids [1]. His conclusion is that based on technical features the OLPC machine is best suited for primary school children and one of the ASUS EeePC, the Intel Classmate, and the Everex Cloudbook would be best suited for high-school students.

The Asus EeePC […]

Linux Resource Controls

Using the “ulimit” controls over process resource use it is possible to limit RAM for processes and to limit the number of processes per UID. The problem is that this often is only good for accidental problems not dealing with malicious acts.

For a multi-user machine each user needs to be allowed to have two […]

Low Power – They Just Don’t get it

For a while I’ve been reading the Lenovo blog Inside The Box [1], even though I plan to keep my current laptop for a while [2] (and therefore not buy another Thinkpad for a few years) I am interested in the technology for it’s own sake and read the blog.

A recent post concerns a […]