Apropos of the most recent loss of data by H.M. Government, the bane of my former Windows-using life speaks thus:
“Had the data on the memory stick been encrypted, its loss would have posed no risk,” said Greg Day, a security analyst with internet company McAfee. [Guardian]
And never mind the quality of the encryption, or keys being lost. “Security is a process, not a product” as Bruce Schneier said 8 years ago.
Today I spent a couple of hours triaging Firefox bugs on OS X as part of the bugdays. I did this once or twice many moons ago; as all things XUL rock the web, I hope to do this more regularly. Aside from contributing to the whole mozilla project, it’s a good way to learn about it.
Downloaded the preferred nightly, named Minefield, and installed it alongside the regular Firefox; no conflicts, which did slightly concern me beforehand. Bookmarks etc loaded fine. Then went to the bugzilla page of bugs needing checking, opened up a bunch of tabs, and tried reproducing the problems. First bug was with a webpage - that always happens, in this case the bugzilla home page has a link for the Quick Search plugin that states “requires Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7.” Installed fine on the alpha, and has carried over to Firefox proper. Bug 448385
Went through 7 or 8 bugs, confirmed some, doubted others. One problem is that I’m on OS X 10.4 (oh how passé) and some of the bugs were reported with 10.5. Ah well, it might narrow down the cause and fix.
Following on from the great password exposure debacle (in which one of my clients was caught up), Fasthosts are once again setting new records in incompetence. This time edugeeks went down because Shaft Toss took 52 hours to replace a broken disk!
There’s only one thing to do when faced with such farces; move to a capable host.
(And evohosting are offering free hosting til August 25th)
Lug Radio Live returns to Wolverhampton, and so does Ubuntu UK, whose stand I will be planning and manning. Expect to have Ubuntu cds thrust into your hands at every opportunity!
L.R.L. blog hard
Ubuntu UK wiki page
Having downloaded some OpenOffice.org templates for use with NeoOffice, I landed up with two .oxt files on my desktop. OS X didn’t recognize the format - the icons were blank sheets of paper - and NeoOffice didn’t want to import them, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Although the documentation claims you can install them “by a double-click on the *.oxt file in your system’s file browser” this doesn’t work on OS X or on Ubuntu. That’s what RTFM does for you.
Turns out .oxt are some sort of tarred .xml file, containing the OOo additions and various meta data.
Help was at hand with The Unarchiver, far superior to Apple’s built-in extractor, and open source (MIT license) to boot. Once the files were unpacked, I had folders on my desktop with all the templates within, importable through OOo. Later found that Stuffit Expander can cope with .oxt as well, but that’s proprietary and naff.
For Ubuntu, File Roller unpacks .oxts just fine.
Ubuntu has just launched Brainstorm, a place for submitting ideas and gauging their interest. So I’ve submitted an old idea - dotUbuntu, or UbuntudotNet, (it doesn’t have a settled name) a remote server allowing for sharing addresses and bookmarks between computers, remotely saving documents and photos, etc.
My text and clickable links follow after the break.
Put it in your diary: Wednesday March 12th, Holmes Wilson of Miro, the open-source internet TV viewer, comes to London to talk about getting rid of the corporate gatekeepers.
As organised by yours truly. 7pm at the University of Westminster, New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW; drinks at The King and Queen pub round the corner afterwards. Press release follows after the break.