Older blog entries for reenoo (starting at number 5)

Innovation

Reminded by Christopher Blizzard's blog entry on a video that takes a look behind the scenes and, to me most interestingly, introduces some of the people behind OLPC I somehow found myself reading up on Bitfrost.

Bitfrost is OLPC's security platform that is going to protect some several million machines all over the world once deployments start, and that is not a small task!

AFAICT the technical specification is not yet ready (or not yet public) but the informal description lists a number of very interesting problems and use cases. While other parts of the OLPC software platform are just usual software evolution in my view, Bitfrost is likely to change how we look at security. If it gets attention from the right people this might turn into a long needed revolution.

It remains to be seen how the concepts behind Bitfrost are implemented, but I'm looking forward to the detailed specification. It is definitely something we need to look into as Familiar gains support for cell phones.

Speaking of innovation, there's promising progress going on behind the scenes of Familiar. Currently, we are concentrating efforts on getting the infrastructure for the next major release right. As usual with infrastructural changes, visible results only come about when things are done, but I'm confident it will be well worth it in the long run.

New Workstation

Sometime late last year my main workstation started locking up randomly, first only under very high load. Early this year it turned so bad, that I had to stop using it altogether for daily work and mainly worked on my laptop which, being small (12") and portable, wasn't really designed for that.

But that is now finally over. All parts for the new workstation have been delivered. I've assembled and tested stuff. Just in time the Debian Installer team released a new RC and the installation of Etch went mostly fine.

I still have to build a patched kernel to get all the hardware to work, but I'm already enjoying using the new, stable workstation :)

Next on the TODO: migrating remaining services off the old system

Choose your allies

I don't want to support any of the actions of the Bush administration or any other
country's administration following them, but I strongly recommend people on
p.g.o to choose their allies a little more carefully

International politics isn't quite as simple a topic as it may sound. Some actions
are clearly violating international law. WIth others the situation isn't as clear, e.g trade
with countries violating Human Rights isn't considered illegal under any treaties
I'm aware of, but you'd still be supporting those crimes.

To that extent, there are few countries in the world that are not on the black
lists of the various NGOs (ai only being the best known one) themselves or keeping
up trade relationships with such countries.

Future of Advogato doubtful?

I was pretty irritated when I saw the news that Advogato might go or be turned
readonly. I mean, the net without Advogato?

I for one, hope Advogato will stay. The service to the Free Software community
(if that still exists) is invaluable. The clean, puristic design of the site in itself makes
Advogato special and allows people to concentrate on content, not eyecandy.

"You don't know what you've got till it's gone"

A lot of things have happened since my last entry, too many things to write about. Among the sad events is that lilo of freenode fame recently passed away. RIP, lilo, and thanks for all your hard work.

So, I've just created an advogato account, mainly in order to use tools like drivel or gnome-blog. I also like the
idea of advogato being a community although I still have to figure out how it all works ;)

I haven't decided whether I'll keep using my existing blog or the advogato diary yet. I guess I'll use both in parallel for a while and see what I prefer.

Oh, and of course I'm too tired to add information on what I do right now. In short: I'm contributing to GPE, Familiar, and OpenEmbedded.