The Firefox 3 Download Day was apparently less a flop than it seemed at first glance (i.e. within the first two hours). They got more than 8 million downloads in 24h, but for some reason the start and end times were apparently really shifted by approximately 105 minutes. Perhaps due to the outages in the beginning.
I finally got the new version and one of the stranger things is the check of the certificate of some pages. For example some pages with a perfectly fine SSL certificate get the “medium” value (i.e. blue) instead of green. No idea why or how this is meant to be. I liked the yellow address bar for this purpose better.
While the Icelandic police had my understanding with shooting the first polar bear in twenty years, after it had approached a settlement, this is definitely just stupid now. There is no excuse for the killing of the two polar bears that were sighted on Monday this week. Tranquilizers should have been available this time, instead real bullets were used again.
And guess what, not the hostility of the (second) bear (this week) was the reason for it being killed - it was the stupid curiosity of journalists. Once the bear started approaching the journalists, it was shot. Nice job!
My proposal for the next time: let the bear kill one or two journalists in order to give the journalists the necessary impressions to develop some respect for such an animal and then you’ve bought yourself some time to get the tranquilizers and the cage to transport the polar bear back to Greenland or to some zoo alive.
The download day for the world record attempt in the number of downloads by the Firefox community seems to be(come) a flop. It’s now 45min after the whole thing started and apparently the servers can’t handle the number of requests.
Or is something going on in parallel? Such as a DDoS of their webservers?
Update: Their site is back, although slow.
Update #2: So they’re prepared? Fun fact, I get offered the version 2 in the language which is set as primary in my primary browser (which isn’t Firefox). Wondering whether the world record attempt will even be valid in such a case …
Update #3: Okay, screw their world-record attempt. I have some sympathies for them, although it is not my favorite browser, but it’s simply getting ridiculous. I am getting offered version 2 as version 3 (screenshot below) and their download page for other languages and operating systems lists only version 2.0.0.14 (other screenshot) for any language. It’s definitely the worst-prepared world-record attempt. Maybe it will make it into the Guiness Book after all, although under a different category than anticipated?!
If you’re juggling files beyond the desktop and still use Windows Explorer, check out SpeedCommander. The new version has gotten even better and unlike another popular “commander-like” file manager it has full Unicode support and even has a native x64 version.
Today two more polar bears were sighted in the North of Iceland. Let’s hope this time there is a veterinarian with tranquilizers, not like last time. My father told me even the German yellow press reported about the polar bear being shot recently.
BTW: No polar bears have been sighted here on Iceland in years before this summer. So it’s a somewhat similar situation as in Bavaria, where a bear was shot after visiting briefly. He was the first in more than 150 years.
// Oliver
A clip about the killing of the first polar bear. The subtitles are not an exact translation of the parts spoken in Icelandic, in case someone wonders.
Following a court ruling, the EFF and several news sources world-wide have reported about the practice to search through the data on electronic devices at the US border. Bruce Schneier has picked up the topic in his latest cryptogram (a newletter). So far everyone seems to have ignored or neglected another possibility: targeted spyware.
In fact I am not just talking about the usual spyware, but software that was written with the sole purpose of going undetected as long as possible and possibly being able to transmit as much data as possible. Spyware in a literal sense. Continue reading ‘Searching electronic devices at the border’
Now that the Irish have rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in a plebiscite, European politicians suggest to leave the Irish behind and ratify the treaty regardless with only the consenting member states. This is a notable development because it shows all too well how the European Union (EU) works. The parliament as the body that represents the people has been overruled more than once by other non-representative bodies of the EU … and alone the fact that only around 4.2 million people out of more than 420 million are allowed to decide about their fate shows how “democratic” the EU and the states of which it is comprised really are.
The European Commission issued an EU-wide radiation alert late on Wednesday after Slovenia began shutting down a nuclear power plant following a problem with the cooling system. (Source: interactive investor, deutsche Leser gehen hierher)
Don’t panic just yet. The amount of information is scarce and from the first comments it sounds like it’s all under control.
Update: BBC also reports now. So there it looks more like it’s a preliminary warning that something worse might follow.
Update #2: It seems everything is under control and it was just to warn in the case something happens. But an EU-wide alert is obviously unusual, given how big the EU is and that “only” cooling water was supposed to have leaked. More info (deutsch).
The patches pertaining to the Debian key rollover are only available in the security repository. I just found out the hard way, that one of my machines denied access to another one, although I had “freshly generated” private keys. Ooops … until I figured that the repository for security fixes should have been in there. Now it is and the keys have been replaced.
Checked the logs and no one got in. Luckily this server is still in the preparational stage and I am always stopping sshd when disconnecting … that should be a pretty high hurdle for any attackers
As I am currently setting up a new server, I thought it would be a good idea to keep most of the configuration files (e.g. /etc) under version control. RCS comes in handy to achieve just that, but laziness requires some kind of script to make its use convenient
So I sat down and wrote this little Bash script for my Debian system (Ubuntu and Knoppix should work as well then). Please note that you may have to change the shebang line, you also may have to adjust the command to call the file editor. I am using the nice “alternatives”-mechanism of Debian by calling editor instead of any specific editor. For example I’ve found myself disliking vi, while others swear an oath that vi is the best editor around. In any case, this problem should not exist if you have set your favorite editor.
If you have no clue what I am talking about, use:
man update-alternatives
Alright, now that you have set your favorite editor for sure, go and make sure to install the rcs and diff packages by issuing (as super-user):
apt-get update && apt-get install rcs diff
… either you’ll have it installed or you will install them with these commands. There shouldn’t be any unsatisfied dependencies on any “normal” system apart from those packages themselves (and even diff would be on most systems already). Continue reading ‘Version-controlled edit via Bash script (Debian)’
Today I experienced the first earthquake I can remember (15:46 local time). It was of strength 6.1 to 6.7 according to first estimates. We should shortly see some entry on the website of Veðurstofa, the meteorology institute of Iceland which also handles seismic information. For now it seems to be literally overloaded by the number of requests (i.e. a legal “DDoS” ). … or maybe the admin, who also formerly worked for FRISK is compiling something at the moment and using up the much needed CPU power?! It was an obsession he had to always check the source code and then compile it himself instead of relying on precompiled binaries (which is not a bad idea).
Update: German and US sources agree that the strength was 6.1 and the source was about 50 km from Reykjavík. Here’s a seismogram (source): 20080529 1546 64.0 -21.0 6.1 ICELAND
Wie schon vor einigen Tagen gemeldet, gibt es bei Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix und eben allen Debian-basierten Distros einen Fehler in der OpenSSL-Bibliothek, die das Erraten von Schlüsseln erleichtern soll. Aus diesem Grund sollte man mindestens ein
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
machen und danach mit ssh-vulnkey -a als Superuser überprüfen, ob kompromittierte Schlüssel auf dem System existieren.
Peter Herzog, Betreiber von Spotlight.de, hat heute bekanntgegeben, daß er Spotlight als Projekt einstellt. Worte des Bedauerns, aber kein Wort darüber was mit den Benutzerdaten passieren soll. Aber was soll es denn auch - spätestens seit er als Forenbetreiber beschloß, daß es okay sei das Forum nachts in einen Wartungsmodus zu schalten, war das Ding für mich gestorben. Leute wie ich oder Nico waren meistens in den Nachtstunden unterwegs, so daß es durchaus einschneidend war. Irgendwann verabschiedeten wir uns dann mehr oder weniger nach mehreren Jahren von Spotlight (bei mir gab es selten auch mal Ausflüge zurück), weil es einfach langweilig geworden war. Ich schwankte damals dann zwischen verschiedenen Delphiforen, und landete schließlich in der Delphi-PRAXiS (DP), die ich aber heute nur noch gelegentlich besuche. Der Grund dafür ist einfach: erstens habe ich kaum noch mit Delphi zu tun (was allerdings dem Wissen in Sachen Win32 API keinen Abbruch tut) und zweitens verkamen mit dem Erscheinen von Google (und anderen Suchmaschinen) viele Delphianer zu Copy&Paste-”Programmierern” (da rollen sich mir die Fußnägel auf, sowas Programmierer zu nennen) und die Foren zu sowas wie “Hausaufgabenforen”. Die DP sticht aus den Delphiforen aber dadurch hervor, daß sie gerade diesen Trend nicht fördert, was der Qualität meines Erachtens nach zuträglich ist. Leider kommt es natürlich partiell weiterhin zu diesen Erscheinungen und die ansäßigen Forengurus sind auch nicht immer so qualifiziert wie sie sich geben …
Aber wer auf der Suche nach einem Ersatzforum ist, dem kann ich die
Today the news of the purchase of CodeGear by Embarcadero Technologies transpired. I am wondering what this brings us (the developers), given the interesting past of Borland.
First it was “Borland” with products like “Borland Pascal” (and “Turbo Pascal”) and at the end of the 1990s it called itself suddenly “Inprise” and we could buy “Inprise Delphi” … wow. After a short interlude under this changed name, we landed back at “Borland” until the point when they “forked” and created a subsidiary responsible for the developer tools, called “CodeGear” and fully owned by them, after failing to sell the branch. Now Embarcadero Technologies was obviously willing to purchase this subsidiary and this will in my opinion be a defining moment for Delphi and C++ Builder.
It felt a bit like these tools all landed in an orphanage called “CodeGear”, rather than a subsidiary fully committed to the development of these formerly great products. I have bought BDS 2006 (which includes Delphi 2006 and C++ Builder 2006) in May 2006 and was very much disappointed. The product is creeping slow. I cannot override any of the prerequisites when installing it and I am even forced to install the .NET SDK 1.x, although I am not at all interested in any of the .NET “personalities” offered by BDS 2006. Hint, Visual Studio 2003 offers the ability to override the prerequisite requirements for those who are anyway not interested in the parts of the product suite that require those.
Now that they have released BDS 2007, and the future version - codenamed Tiburon - is on the doorstep, I have lost all my trust in that company and find the upgrade prices from the failed product BDS 2006 to the newer versions is ridiculous, given that I might just get another failed product. Borland/Inprise/Borland/CodeGear isn’t known to provide trial versions that allow you to actually try all aspects of their products. For example the command line compiler is known to be missing or crippled. So what am I supposed to do? Believe some of the pro-Delphi zealots once again to get disappointed once again?
Waiting for input …,
// Oliver
PS: I’ll certainly observe the developments in these products, but it’s getting a bit more scary at the moment, rather than exciting or at least reassuring.
Update: looking at this, “Commodore” seems to be the one I am waiting for, not Tiburon.
). … or maybe the admin, who also formerly worked for FRISK is compiling something at the moment and using up the much needed CPU power?! It was an obsession he had to always check the source code and then compile it himself instead of relying on precompiled binaries (which is 
