The Open Source Initiative has two classes of board seats: Affiliate seats, and Individual Member seats. In the upcoming election, each affiliate can nominate a candidate, and each affiliate can cast a vote for the Affiliate candidates, but there's only 1 Affiliate seat available. I initially expressed interest in being nominated as an Affiliate candidate via Debian. But since Bradley Kuhn is also…
I recently attended Snappy Sprint Heidelberg, the first Snappy sprint focused on upstream and cross-distribution collaboration. Snappy is a technology with an interesting history: initially started to provide App Store-like semantics (atomicity, declarative security) for the Ubuntu Phone project, it has since expanded to be a platform for desktop application deployment (e.g. VLC ), as well as…
I'm migrating PGP keys from 0xF9FDD506 to 0x0C14A470. If you signed my old key, I would appreciate you signing my new key as well. Feel free to ping me with questions. Accordingly, I've published a transition statement signed by both keys.
Dropbox has acquired Zulip, the business instant messaging startup I've worked at since August 2012. Its been a great ride the past one and a half years — I definitely have loved working with this amazing team. We're incredibly excited about working with an awesome group of people on a problem with huge scale, at a company that's as passionate as we are about helping people work together…
Implementing software to replace legacy systems is always a challenge, especially when you're dealing with a system with as much legacy as sendmail , which was first introduced as delivermail in 1979. ref Each UNIX vendor, it seems, rewrote or heavily customized sendmail . This has lead to sometimes conflicting implementations. Case in point: -t Normally, you invoke sendmail(8) with a series of…
(or, cutting out bloat by using a platform where bloat won't fly) Let me start off by saying I'm generally a huge fan of my bank, USAA . Their offerings are free of hidden fees, their phone support excellent, and the perks they provide are competitive. They don't have the best savings interest rates, but you can always find a better deal online to park money not actively in your checking account.…
I'm pleased to say that I have joined the Debian FTPTeam as of the Friday before last. See Joerg Jaspert's announcement on debian-devel-announce. The FTPTeam is responsible for maintaining the Debian software archive, and ensures that new software in Debian is high-quality and compliant with our policies. As an "ftpassistant", I (along with Paul , Scott , Gergely , and others ) will be helping to…
A few weeks ago I taught a class on Open Source: Contributing to free culture ( catalog entry ) for Spark , a one-day program put on by the student-run MIT Educational Studies Program . I was fortunate to have two helpful co-teachers, Tyler Hallada and Jacob Hurwitz , who assisted with the lesson plan and the in class lecture. We ended up teaching 3 sessions of the 1hr 50min class that Saturday,…
For those of you back at my university , you may have noticed I'm not there this semester. Google's 2012 FEP team I spent this past summer at Google, Inc , developing internal tools for the AdSense team, specifically Google Programmable Ads. Being at Google was great; I loved my team and my intern cohort, the rest of the interns in the Freshman Engineering Practicum . I'm not currently at Google;…
This semester, I created an Android application which processes approval of transactions on the internet in conjunction with a web interface. I walked through the AMPED web interface and server code with my faculty mentor, and we conducted a security analysis of the protocol used in the project. The end result is an application which can be used to handle arbitrary authentication requests, as…
I've been pretty quiet online these past few months. My first term at George Mason has been a blast; but I've been super busy. In that time I've joined Student Government as the Undersecretary for Information Technology, where I've worked on improving our campus residential and wireless network along with the really awesome people at ITU TSD . I became a UTA for the Computer Science I class at my…
In Thunderbird, if you read a message on a mailing list and want to reference a post in a blog or elsewhere, you may often want to access a copy of the mailing list posting on the web. While you can often accomplish this by searching for the subject or manually finding it in the specific archives of that list, if you're using full mail headers , there's a built-in way to find a message on the web.…
This is my last night in Arlington for two months. I'm leaving for a brief vacation, and next week I'm off to Cambridge for my summer job with Ksplice, Inc . After that, I'll be here for 3 days packing for college, and then I'll be off again. Its been a fun 12 years. To all the friends I've made here, stay in touch.
I look forward to Ubuntu's semiannual release day, because it's the completion of 6ish months of work by Ubuntu (and by extension Debian) developers. I also loathe it, because every single time we get people saying "This Ubuntu release is the worst release ever!". Ubuntu releases are always rocky around release time, because the first time Ubuntu gets widespread testing is on or after release day.…
For those of you who missed all the news coverage , here's a quick (and hopefully straightforward) explanation of the issue. What is this? Executive summary: The way secure communications is handled on the internet is broken, and a recent attack higlighted that. People running the latest version of their browsers are protected. Whenever you visit a web site, your're either accessing that site…
I usually write about technical topics in this space, so pardon my digression. </metablogging> Today my AP Gov't class took a trip to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). We were fortunate to get reserved seating thanks to one of my classmates , so we skipped the line and were able to sit for an entire argument. We didn't get to choose which of the two arguments we saw, since half our…
On a lark, I signed up for the pilot program of the Google Cr-48 about a week ago. To my surprise, I found the distinctive box on my doorstep a week later. After initially mistaking it for an overpacked, late-model OLPC XO-1 I would have to repair , I sort of did a double-take as I realized what I had received. Using Chrome OS Wow, they weren't kidding about the boot time. Chrome OS responds (to…
I've been thinking a lot recently about information security and passwords. It's widely agreed that two-factor authentication, which combines something-you-know (a password) with something you have (eg. a smart card or some one-time-password ) is superior to using a password by itself. Most solutions I've seen, short of client-side certificates, both require a trusted third party and provide…
As Christian mentioned , the Debian Keyring Maintainers did a "promote" this weekend of the new keyring . I figure it's an opportune time to perform a public key transition, since this had the effect of replacing my key on the keyring. For my new key, 0xF9FDD506 , I decided to opt for a 4096-bit RSA , which is stronger than I should have to worry about for the foreseeable future. The key is much…
To quote the ftp-masters REJECT-FAQ : Write manpages. Yes. Really. Write them. Well. It's basically: If your program/tool has a help and version commandline option you can simply run help2man and have a working start. What may not be obvious to the recently REJECT ed developer is actually how to use help2man . To try t0 explain the process a bit more verbosely, I took the liberty of writing a…
I'm a Debian Maintainer currently undergoing the New Maintainer process. I'm also an Ubuntu MOTU as of recently . I have several packages in a variety of categories, but I specialize in Python-based software. I'm interested in exploring more ways to improve cross-distribution coordination, specifically as it relates to the Debian Sugar packages. I'm working to get all of the Ubuntu-specific Sugar…
Of the 12 servers sent to Sugar Labs, 6 arrived at the Arlington Career Center. Three of them stayed there, whereas I brought three home to attempt to salvage what I could from them. The three that arrived are described below. wmf-01 "le premier" 2x Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 285 @ 2606.342 MHz 2x 250 GB HDDs, 2x slots empty 2 Gigabit Ethernet NICs This machine worked swimmingly. wmf-02…
On suspendable computers retaining network services with conditional wakeup... (11:28:29 AM) Luke Faraone : don't you hate it when you think of something cool, only to find that someone else already thought of it? (11:28:47 AM) Peter Harkins : Depends. Sometimes I then think "Awesome, now I don't have to spend all that time building it." (11:29:34 AM) Luke Faraone: I recently was thinking "it'd be…
After reading several articles about the alleged spying that was enabled by a Pennsylvania school district via its one-to-one MacBook , and seeing discussion on a variety of mailing lists, I've decided to implement my own zero-cost, no-hassle solution to the problem for the OLPC XO-1 's camera. This should be able to be adopted in deployments everywhere, by anyone with a piece of paper, or…
I'm the package maintainer for Autokey in Debian. Upstream recently changed from using GTK+ to Qt4, which caused more than one complaint from users of testing . The GTK+ version of the package is published in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic . While upstream is continuing to do regular releases of the GTK version, they are focusing on the KDE version and have changed autokey to refer to the KDE version, while…