Blogs

Today I was surprised to notice that some blog entries on this website have received a couple of comments. On closer inspection, though, it turned out that the comments were merely comment spam. It is a mystery how the spambot responsible for the comments managed to circumvent my CAPTCHA system, but I guess I should have known that it would happen eventually. After all, the spam bastards of this world are wildly determined to destroy the fun and usefulness of everything, including this little, insignificant website :-(

A few minutes ago I stumbled across this page. After a moment of stunned silence (incredulous thought: "can this really be true?") I suffered one of those true laughing fits that leave you weak and helpless :-)

On second thought, I now wonder: What's the point? Why do they do this? Here are my ruminations...

Yesterday I finally had enough! The spam situation had escalated to such a painful level that, even though I had long tried to avoid it, at last I made the decision to configure my system to use greylisting. Using the Debian package greylistd and studying this excellent HOWTO, I was able to whip up a suitable configuration for my MTA (Exim) in a very short time. After a few manual tests I let the experiment go live, and waited...

Today I published a new PGP key (the ID is 0x1319CD4F3FF38573), the third since I started fiddling with PGP in 2002. The first key never made it to any keyserver, and the second key was published to keyservers but I never really used it except for encrypting some private documents.

The third key is what I hope I can stick to. I strongly intend to use it for signing future releases of my software projects (e.g. it is very easy to sign a tag in a Git repository), but I also hope to build a web of trust of my own and get into the strong set. For starters, I have got the CAcert signature... Feel free to contact me if you are interested in getting my signature (cross-signing would be appreciated), but first you might wish to read my PGP Key Signing Policy.

Note: Links to the published version of my key are available at the bottom of every page on this site.

A few months ago, after a brief encounter with svk, I became interested in distributed version control systems (or DSCMs). I soon decided that I wanted to move away from Subversion - not because I didn't like SVN anymore, but because I saw an interesting new technical challenge, and also because I thought (and still think) that knowing how to work with a DSCM is a valuable skill to employers. After a brief comparison of the most prominent open source DSCMs (Bazaar, Git, Mercurial), I decided to go with Git.

Today I finally completed the migration from Subversion to Git repositories. The following links are in operation as of now:

• Browse repositories online (gitweb): https://www.herzbube.ch/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi
• Clone repositories (git-over-HTTP, read-only): https://herzbube.ch/git/
• git-over-SSH, read+write: On request

Version 0.3 of mkroesti renames the hash crypt-system to crypt-des and adds the following new hashes:

• crypt-md5
• crypt-sha-256
• crypt-sha-512
• crypt-apr1; this hash requires the module python-aprmd5 which I am going to make available as a separate project ASAP

As usual, the tar ball is available from the project page.

This new version of mkroesti adds Python 3 support, hopefully keeping backward compatibility with Python 2.6. Go to the project page to download the tar ball.

I have just made the first public release 0.1 of dgsmonX, a little project that I have been working on over the past 2 years. The project has its own web page where you will find more details if you are interested.

Here is the project summary:

dgsmonX is a faceless Mac OS X application (i.e. an application that is not visible in the Dock) that monitors the games you have joined on any number of Dragon Go Servers (DGS) and alerts you when it is your turn to move.

This is the first public release 0.1 of mkroesti, a small Python learning project of mine. Visit the project web page for details if the following project résumé piques your interest.

mkroesti is a program written in Python that, given an input, is capable of generating different kinds of cryptographic and other hashes from that input. mkroesti takes its input either interactively from the user, or from any one of the following sources: standard input, the command line, any file. So far, mkroesti does not have its own implementation of hash algorithms. Instead, it relies on other Python modules to provide algorithm implementations and merely acts as a front end to those modules.

At the moment, mkroesti can only be run as a command line utility. One of the next versions will allow mkroesti to be run as a web application. There is also a plan for implementing a Mac OS X GUI front end.

Click on the "read more" link to see one hell of a convincing reason for loving Macs!