It’s time for a great summer in Germany again! And what better opportunity to spend it than with Gentoo friends at LinuxTag?
The largest Linux consumer and developer fair in Europe will be taking place Wednesday, June 24th to Saturday, June 27th. And of course Gentoo will be there with a booth. Meet some of the developers of your favourite distribution, and satisfy all your ebuild needs, maybe even have us fix one or the other bug. We even hope to bring some merchandise this time. So if you haven’t registered for a hostel or hotel, you might want to do that now.
You are also more than welcome to contribute to the booth, either by attending as a staff member (free entrance to the show is only one of the many benefits!), or by organising t-shirts, flyers and maybe even cups. Please contact me via email if you’re up for that.
And now back to hacking on my thesis and some security bugs… oh, and NetworkManager 0.7.1 is coming, thanks to Robert Piasek and Gilles Dartiguelongue who have been contributing a lot to the ebuilds while I was slacking.
According to the author the $35 Windows program Folder Lock is “a fast file-security program that can password-protect, lock, hide and encrypt any number of files… Protected files are hidden, undeletable, inaccessible and highly secure”. It even works on “USB Flash Drives, Memory Sticks, CD-RW, floppies and notebooks.”
Now while I still wonder how they protect files from deletion on USB sticks, Charalambous Glafkos found out that the password to encrypt the files is stored in the Windows Registry. For maximum security it is reversed and encrypted with ROT-25.
Don’t use them. Or review the results before clicking “Send”. (via hadess)
Writing a bug report is a hard thing to do. I know. Fortunately, there’s some easy rules to follow when you want to get it fixed and fast! To ease your understanding, I will illustrate them with some real-life examples:
- Scream. It’s so easy to write upper-case (thanks for caps lock!). And for most people, they’re much easier to read. They’re stupid anyway, so they’re probably used to being screamed at. So start with a nice “OH MY GOD. What went through your head when you did this?”, then go on explaining your problem: “gcc is FUCKING SLOW”.
- Annoy. If possible, mark the bug with highest priority and severity. You filed it, so you decide on how important it is for others! After you expounded your problems that verbosely, say something personal. This helps: “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
- Show that you’re annoyed. There’s quite some ways to do that. Use your fantasy, remember how you did that when you were a child. “Even Apple and Microsoft would be ashamed of fucking up this badly.” or “What a great distro you have there. Debian would be proud of you.”
- When people ask questions, insult them. Really, they shouldn’t try to reproduce the bug anyway. Why would they want to have the bug themselves, instead of just fixing it! “I’ll give you personally ten bucks if this helps you debug the issue. … I dare you to tell me how the emerge –info helps you. Do it publicly, please, so the humiliation is greater. “
- Threaten. If not everyone will know how important your bug is to you until here, you should make that clear again: “But apparently Gentoo is not interested in fixing bugs. … Don’t bother. I’ll switch distros.”
- Propose bad solutions. This is actually hard. You have to distinguish your solution from the way it is right now (”This whole construct is braindead.”) Remember not to ask or think about the reasons why it’s the way it is right now.
- Point fingers. “This is so unbelievable that I will blog about it, too.”
Sadly for the example, following these steps didn’t fix the bug. Another report did.