Makura no Soshi

Und noch ein kleiner Hinweis: Bei den Chemnitzer Linux-Tagen sind nun seit einigen Tagen die Audio-Aufzeichnungen der Vorträge online.

Getreu dem Motto „Es ist Dein Projekt“ fand ich viele Vorträge recht kleinteilig und bastelig (à la „Meine drölfzigste Raspberry Pi Lampensteuerung“). Meine persönlichen Highlights waren dann auch zwei Vorträge, die mehr zu meinem eigenen Arbeitsbereich passen: Valentin Haenels Vorstellung des AWS Federation Proxy (leider noch ohne Audio) und René Kochs Übersicht zu oVirt.

Just did some housekeeping of my server I want to document.

Most importantly I got myself a Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate for this blog (and my mailserver), so you no longer have to deal with my self-signed cert to use HTTPS. There has been some discussion about their official client tool, but for a first release it does not seem to be too bad; at least it is written in Python and not in Java or Scala etc. The ACME protocol itself looks sensible and I look forward to more lightweight implementations in the future.

Having a public CA also gave me the opportunity to add an HTTP Strict Transport Security header. Now the next step would be HTTP Public Key Pinning, but that is still out of range for a non-professional website; because Let’s Encrypt may still change their intermediary CA certificate and I also do not have a backup CA that I could use in case of a problem. (BTW, nice HPKP advice on the Let’s Encrypt community site.)

Somewhat related I also expired my old 1024 bit PGP key from  as well as the PGP key of my former work address at DECK36. (BTW, here is a nice description how-to edit gpg key expiration dates by George Notaras.) In order to reach me securely please use my current PGP key (0x4dc5e2280a327754, also on my Contact page).

One personal goal this winter is to do more programming in beautiful languages.

At this moment I am quite excited about Python 3, Perl 6, and Go. Read the rest of this entry »

Train Rides

The day before: “Oh great, several hours on my own. I will pack books and I am gonna get so much reading and writing done.”
On the train: “Argh, I am tired, and it is too loud, I cannot concentrate on anything.”
The day after: “Where went all that time? What did I do?”

Hotel Wi-Fi

The day before: “There will probably be some kind of Wi-Fi available. It is 2014 and it has to be better now than it was the last time.”
On site, after a painful experience including ridiculous prices and/or asking for silly access codes, counting it a success if there is decent signal strength (even without reasonable bandwidth) in the lobby: “Thank god for my smartphone data plan.”

Conferences

9am: “I wonder why they keep so many snacks and cake arround. I just had breakfast and I am fine till lunch.”
After 2-3h of talks or a workshop: “Hunger! I want sugar… and caffeine… and then some more sugar!”

After I could not make it last year I was glad to come back to Chemnitz for this years Linux-Tage.

This time I did not have any talk and did not sign up for the BSD booth. So I had more time and attended more talks than usual and the (possibly subjective) impression that talks were better than in previous years. The only (small) drawback of success: with ever more guests everything becomes more crowded.

One particularly interesting presentation was the one on structured logging by Jens Kühnel. — That is more or less the long overdue follow-up for my very old talk on Syslog (pdf).

I have been quite lazy with my PGP key. At some time I even removed its expiration date, because I was too busy to generate a new one. But lazy or not… a key of 1024 bits has to be considered legacy now, furthermore it is time to remove my different university addresses.

So this years resolution is to switch to a new key — which is now online on my contact page and public keyserver. (The old one is also online and still usable for some time).

A nice surprise last week: textproc/libcrm114 became my first official FreeBSD port.  :-)

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