Some folks at Princeton's CS department have done a good analysis of a Diebold voting system, the kind used in many elections across the country. They've done a good job of presenting their findings in several different forms, for various audiences ("executive summary", a video, an in-depth technical whitepaper). There's ways for anyone with web access to really grasp the content of their research, which i find pretty admirable.

Folks who know me know my personal preference is for the technical whitepaper, which was actually a great read. It's very clearly explained, sober and direct, and points out the wide range of potential vulnerabilities that the machines share with most commercial PCs, in addition to a series of vulnerabilities specific to the Diebold-proprietary software. If you have any interest in computer security, do yourself a favor and read it. They're thinking about these things the right way.

i use the insidious big brother database (bbdb, a set of elisp scripts that runs under emacs) to track my contacts.

it integrates with vm (my MUA, which is also implemented in elisp and runs under emacs), so that i can type part of a user's name in the To: line of an e-mail composition buffer, hit tab, and it fills in the rest, including the e-mail address (which bbdb stores in a field named "net:" in its records).

jamie and i just sorted out how to get notifications working on this noesis installation. The problem appears to be that the cronjob wasn't running properly, mainly because it was being kicked off by php4-cli, and php4-cli's configuration (/etc/php4/cli/php.ini in a sarge system) didn't have the mysql.so extension loaded.

Since the notifications are normally kicked off by drupal's cronjob, and the cronjob couldn't access the database, nothing was happening. frankly, i think this should have generated an error condition that alerted the sysadmin that the cronjob was not being run somehow. perhaps that's a bug in the debian packaging of the cronjob?

i recently upgraded the linux kernel on an old workhorse of a machine ("grunt"). i got grunt in a yard sale back in 2000 for ~$35, and he has worked splendidly and untiringly since then, even moving across the country with me.

sometime between 1 or 2 years ago, i put a large extra disk into grunt, and i've been using that disk as a massive filestore since then. (it's not so massive now, of course, because disks have gotten larger, but...)

anyhow, grunt is running debian linux ("sarge"), which is normally incredibly stable and robust. I upgraded the kernel recently because there was a raft of security updates recently released for sarge. patching is good computer hygiene, and this particular kernel upgrade was probably a bit overdue. However, this was grunt's first reboot in over 6 months, and when he came back up, his initscripts wanted to fsck the huge disk. This fsck run took well over 10 minutes: the ATA bus is an old, slow one, and the disk is massive. It didn't help things that i panicked in the middle of it and tried hard-resetting the machine because i couldn't tell what was going on. This just caused the fsck to restart from the beginning again, of course.

ok, so i typo a lot. but today, i found a great tool thanks to my clumsy fingers.

i was trying to check the date in a backgrounded rxvt session where i couldn't see the command line.

Here's what i got:

[dkg@squeak ~]$ ddate
Today is Sweetmorn, the 47th day of Bureaucracy in the YOLD 3171
[dkg@squeak ~]$

i'm starting to look at ways to automate full installs of debian. here is another method. it uses preseeding, and can potentially fetch directives over the network.

i haven't tested it yet, though. i found it on joeyh's blog.

Debian Administration, a great, relatively new site dedicated to working with the One True OS, has an interesting article about doing fancy backups using duplicity.

i've been impressed with the quality of the work on d-a, and with the reasonableness and skill level of the community.

So tonight, i finally managed to get an OpenAFS cell up and running, though at the moment, i've only tried to access the files from the machine acting as the main dbserver and fileserver.

This is building on top of my previous work trying to establish a demonstration domain. Earlier, i'd managed to get kerberos5 working in conjunction with LDAP for a pair of clients (one running ubuntu 5.04 and the other running OSX 10.3). I also had a (non-kerberized)

I'm starting to deal with some desktop publishing requests (a yearbook for Urban), and i've turned to Scribus. It's come a long way since i first tried it out, which i think was only about a year ago.

I need to learn more about it, because there are some things (such as auto-aligning elements or binding them into groups for aggregate manipulation) which i'm pretty sure you can do, but i don't know how yet. it appears to have good ability to import from Inkscape, as well. Nice to see that kind of interaction between projects.

Am I punk enough?

This site also uses a very nice looking content management system called Mambo. Too bad it's not in Debian. I wonder why?