The Musings of Chris Samuel

Finally I’ve stumbled across packages of the KDE4 version of Digikam (0.10) which is currently in beta.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

They’re part of the Digikam Experimental Personal Package Archive (PPA) and so track the latest development releases (0.10.0-rc1 as I write this) and work for me on Ubuntu Intrepid with KDE 4.2 (at the moment) – remember to install Marble!

Note

Many thanks to Maarten Fonville who previously provided packages that this story originally pointed to, and who commented with the above alternative archive.

Now this is, umm, interesting..

We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites. As a proof of concept we executed a practical attack scenario and successfully created a rogue Certification Authority (CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers. This certificate allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol.

Trust no one..

(Via)

Courtesy of my kernel log:

Jan 1 10:59:59 quad kernel: [303561.577455] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

(Thanks to Jason White for pointing out that it was logged on the luv-main list)

Kogan, an Australian company who usually specialise in LCD’s, are making a mobile handset (the Agora) for Google Android (which uses the Linux kernel) with 3G, quad band GSM, GPS, wifi, Bluetooth, etc… It’s due to start shipping at the end of January and I’ve just pre-ordered mine to hopefully provide a more functional open source phone and let me hack more with my OpenMoko phone without having to worry about not having a working phone.

Just to wish everyone all the best for 2009. Hope you have a happy and safe new year!

                          Call for Papers
      3rd International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in
                    Distributed Computing (VTDC-09)

http://grid-appliance.org/vtdc09

                     In conjunction with ICAC 2009
                    Barcelona, Spain, June 15 2009

Read the rest of this entry »

Executive summary: ext4 rocks, check the numbers at the end!

With 2.6.28 arriving over Xmas I took the opportunity to upgrade my home desktop and laptop to it (the laptop had been running a number of RC releases quite happily). Everything was happy so I thought I’d try migrating my /home partition to ext4, but before I started I decided to run a quick Bonnie++ comparison between XFS and the new stable ext4 from the console before the rsync. The (very) rough numbers were:

I didn’t note down the rest. So not a lot of difference there (or so I thought, but more on that in a bit). Using rsync to copy all my data over didn’t take too long and a quick shuffle of UUID’s in /etc/fstab and I rebooted and was happily using my shiny new ext4 logical volume. Everything was working fine but it wasn’t until I was poking in the logs a day or two later that I noticed this:

EXT4-fs warning (device dm-13): ext4_fill_super: extents feature not enabled on this filesystem, use tune2fs.

That’s unusual because since 2.6.23 that was meant to be enabled by default. A quick play with tune2fs under both Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid showed that they didn’t support that option so I ended up grabbing
e2fsprogs from SourceForge and building it myself. With that done I could use its mkfs.ext4 command to build a fully functional ext4 filesystem and get the far better message:

EXT4-fs: file extents enabled

Another long rsync later and I was up and running with ext4 with all the features I wanted.

Of course this meant that my initial ext4 numbers were without extents, so I’ve just done another run (though this time with X and a full KDE 4 session going) and was blown away by the results:

Version 1.03b       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
quad            16G           68123  17 30013   6           64239   8 363.1   1
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++
quad,16G,,,68123,17,30013,6,,,64239,8,363.1,1,16,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++

real    18m18.005s
user    0m1.280s
sys     1m46.434s

That’s a full 2 minutes faster (and then some) and the I/O is just enormous!

So here’s that first table again, but with an extra column for ext4 with extents:

This looks fun..

Via Bruce Schneier, an image from the Washington Post comparing the rules for slot machines against voting machines. The image is dated 2006, but I doubt much has changed since then (if at all).

Obviously money is far more important than democracy.

Today is the annual celebration of the birth of Isaac Newton, a most remarkable fellow.

I hope you all have a most excellent day for whatever you choose to celebrate (or not)!

This year Donna and I decided that rather than sending cards and presents to family and friends this year we would instead make a donation of GBP 100 on all our behalfs to the World Land Trust (David Attenborough is their patron) for their appeal to purchase land to protect wildlife corridors vital for Orang-Utans in Borneo.

Their page on the project is here:

http://www.worldlandtrust.org/projects/malaysia.htm

and the donations page (with our message, amongst everyone else’s) is here:

http://www.justgiving.com/worldlandtrustborneo

Spot the typo by me..