Planet FOSDEM

Speaking of Packman mirrors... we're in a pretty sorry state regarding that so if you're aware of sites that do mirror Packman but never told us (I'm aware of the one at yandex.ru, have to get it on that mirror list), or if you can get in touch with some mirror sites near you or even on your continent to ask them to mirror Packman, please do.

They can then simply contact us on our mailing-list (that's packman followed by an "at" sign followed by "links2linux" and a dot and "de" -- grrr to spammers) and we'll get back to them with the details for rsync.

The Packman mirror at packman.inode.at is down. We don't know yet what happened nor whether it will be back up soon (or not).

In the mean time, please use another mirror in the mean time.

Here's a quick copy'n'paste one-liner you can put in a shell (konsole, gnome-terminal, xterm, urxvt, ...) as root to switch:

perl -p -i.old -e \
's,^(baseurl=).*(/suse/.+)$,${1}http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/packman${2}, if /^baseurl=.*packman\.inode\.at.*/' \
/etc/zypp/repos.d/*packman*.repo

At work we mainly use Subversion for version control. For what it does, it works fairly well.

But everyone else has been using git for ages (GitHub is hugely popular, and projects like Drupal have also made the switch). Added to that: the few times I’ve tried branching in SVN, the ensuing merges ruined my day — completely.

So I decided to learn git, for professional work (superior branching/merging) and for personal stuff (working with Drupal and GitHub code, among others).

I started at home, archiving my /home/flo/data/ documents in git and syncing it on multiple computers.

Next, I made the jump in a big way at work: I’m now using git-svn for new projects. So I’m using git, while also still publishing the commits to (remote) SVN.

For using this workflow and still knowing what you’re doing, you need to advance fairly high on the git learning curve:

• adding and committing (obviously)
• branching
• stashing changes
• merging branches
• rebasing branches

So far, so good: working with git-svn is going quite smooth.
It turns out git’s merging is nice, but the interactive rebasing (rewording, reordering and squashing commits) before publication is even nicer.

Online resource I’ve appreciated along the way:

• Hg Init, to un-learn the limitations of Subversion
  • Read it twice if you suffer from CVS, Visual SourceSafe or worse symptoms!
• The Git Parable by Tom Preston-Werner
  • Conceptually explains why it’s a good idea to have full-history commits.
• New artisans’ Git from the Bottom up
  • Explains the hashes, trees and blobs that Git is built on.
  • It’s only a pity that this detailed technical approach is given up halfway through the document, where the usual high-level “let’s-draw-some-trees” approach takes over.
• Some nice rants (not always correct though): Steveko 10 things I have about Git, Reinvigorated programmer Git is a Harrier Jump Jet

Bugtracker! I meant to say "bugtracker", I swear!

So, the oh so popular and useful Packman project finally has a proper bugtracker, how awesome is that? Yes, truckloads of awesome. More seriously, it was about time and I finally just decided to do it.

From now on, please use our bugtracker to submit bugs, package requests, etc..., rather than using the mailing-list, although the latter is still fine for discussions and such, obviously.

Using a bugtracker will make it a lot easier for everyone to keep up with what needs to be done, for the packagers to pick things to do when they're bored (hah! right... I had to look up that word in the dictionary), and to make it clear once more that we definitely need more packagers to join and help out.

One needs to create a user account to be able to file a bug/request, but that's quick and doesn't involve any pain. We cannot use openSUSE accounts (as on .opensuse.org), sadly.

In case you didn't notice from the links above, the URL of the Packman bugtracker is https://bugs.links2linux.org.

Na 7 jaar professioneel leven zonder een dag ziekteverzuim hebben de virussen en bacteriën me er uiteindelijk toch onder gekregen.

Momenteel verwerk ik mijn vierde keelontsteking in drie maanden tijd, met tussenin nog een weekje hoestbuien (”genre TBC” volgens een collega).

De dokter vermoedt ‘hyperreactiviteit’. Kort gezegd is dat een ander woord voor ‘heel snel ziek’ .
Blijkbaar een soort van allergische reacties van de slijmvliezen, zonder echt voor iets specifiek allergisch te zijn. En die ontstekingen – keelpijn, pijnlijke amandelen en een drukkend gevoel op de oren – zijn daar gewoon een neveneffectje van.

Het vreemde is dat ik me ’s ochtends meestal kiplekker voel, om dan geleidelijk aan de dag door te strompelen en ’s avonds als een slappe vod in de zetel te eindigen.

De pillen en sprays van de dokter slagen er goed in om de symptomen weg te werken, maar doorgaans begint de miserie een week nadien gewoon opnieuw. Best vermoeiend op den duur…

Om plaats te maken voor vers bedachte woordpelingen, eerst nog een paar oude die nog niet gepubliceerd waren…

• Shoppemiekes
• Schrokolade
• Sportdopmanager

Culinair zal deze blog nooit hoge toppen scheren, wees gerust.

Maar wanneer een experiment in de keuken kan leiden tot twee woordspelingen — een specialiteit van het huis, als het ware — dan willen we u de details niet onthouden.

Dus ziehier: een experimenteel recept voor één-pans croque monsieur; officieel getiteld het hutsecroque expericept.

• Begin met een enorme hoeveelheid broodkorsten waar je vanaf wil. Bijvoorbeeld — zuiver hypothetisch geval uiteraard — overschotjes van een baby die enkel de zachte stukjes eet.
• Snij de korsten in stukjes van 3 à 4 centimeter.
• Een klontje boter in de pan (à la Meus uiteraard) en de korsten erbovenop.
• Een paar minuten laten bakken, af en toe roeren.
• Twee sneetjes kaas in vierkantjes snijden en mee de pan in.
• Indien gewenst, idem met een schelletje hesp.
• Nog even laten opwarmen zonder roeren.

Resultaat: een hutsecroque die naar croque monsieur smaakt (verrassing!) en een interessante textuur heeft, vooraal daar waar de korsten aan elkaar plakken dankzij de gesmolten kaas. En sneller klaar dan gewone croque.

collectd is a very nice metrics collection daemon for Linux, *BSD and a few other Unix variants. Essentially, what it does is run in the background, record a lot of metrics about the system and store them into RRD, from which you can then visualize time graphs.

There are around 100 plugins, going from low level things such as CPU load, memory usage to application level metrics like MySQL slow queries, Apache access log, memcached, etc..., as well as the ability of writing your own plugins in many languages using a nice, well documented and stable API.

I'm maintaining the latest version of collect for openSUSE in the server:monitoring repository.

Finally finished to upgrade to the latest, 5.0.3 -- please test and report any issues either directly to me by email, or using our bug tracker.

We are pleased to announce that the first video recordings of FOSDEM 2012 have been uploaded to our master server; they should be available shortly as our mirrors synchronize with our main server. You can browse the contents through video.fosdem.org.

Please note that this is only the first batch; there are many more videos to come. We will make an announcement when all videos have been uploaded; meanwhile, please bear with us as we continue with transcoding and fixing up of the remaining videos.

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We love feedback!

Please take a minute to fill out our online feedback form, or send us a mail at info@fosdem.org.

Our video team is hard at work to make the video recordings available. No news yet on exactly when they will appear online, but stay tuned!

For those of you interested in the technical aspect of the video streaming, have a look at http://grep.be/blog/en/life/fosdem/2012_video .

The reasons why I have been silent

I have been silent on my blog during the last two years. There are several reasons to this. I went through a serie of emotionally hard to live events during which I had no time left for Ekiga. I guess it happens to all Free Software authors who are developing during their spare time.

Things are getting better now. I have moved into a new house 2 years ago. I also met Claire a few months after I separated from Jonita and I am finally getting prepared to become a father!

I decided to dedicate some spare time to the Ekiga project again. During the time I was not coding, a few people like Eugen Dedu, Julien Puydt, Yannick Defais, and a few others have made their best to keep the project alive.

A few interviews

Two interviews have been published a while ago.

The first interview has been published by Josette on her Josetteorama blog.
The second interview has been published by Billy Toulas on OSArena. It is available both in English and in Greek.

Ekiga 4.00

Work has started on Ekiga 4.00 a few weeks ago. The release should be ready around March when we have done enough testing.

Stay tuned for more information about this exciting new release!

FOSDEM would like to thank all volunteers who helped make our conference possible again. The bussload of students that helped with the setup, the numerous volunteers that reacted to the call for volunteers, the people who spontaneously showed up at the infodesk offering their services. The regular veterans, the new blood. You all did a splendid job and we sincerely hope to see you all again next year.

Thanks, guys. Couldn't have done it without you!

We have discovered that the printed schedules end about an hour before the conference is scheduled to end. We are still trying to decide whether the schedule is too long or the paper too short.

Note that at 17:00 in Janson, Bdale Garbee will present his Freedom, Out of the Box! keynote. This will be followed immediately by the closing talk and FOSDEM dance.

Be there ... or be elsewhere!

FOSDEM is streaming video from a select number of rooms this year (see the URLs if you want to watch).

Watching the stream from home? Love it? Hate it? Feedback is much appreciated!

You can join us through IRC: #fosdem on Freenode, or (with slightly higher latency) use hashtag #fosdemvideo on twitter.

Thanks!

Unfortunately, due to time constraints we were unable to entertain the crowd with our usual FOSDEM dance.
To make up for this, we have rescheduled it to after the closing talk.

The following are last-minute changes and are not in the booklet or printed schedule:

Saturday

Opening talk:

• only in Janson

Open Mobile Linux devroom:

• new: 'Clouds over computing' by Jens Wiik at 18:00

Virtualization and Cloud devroom:

• cancelled: 'Application scheduling on OpenStack' at 12:00

Sunday

Telephony and Communications devroom:

• talk swap: 'Mobicents, TelScale and RestComm' now at 10:30
• talk swap: 'Enhancing FreePBX with Adhearsion' now at 13:20

Free Java devroom:

• 'OpenJDK on ARM: Quo vadis' not 60 minutes but 30 minutes

Perl devroom:

• new: 'LedgerSMB: Open source accounting running on Perl' at 12:25

Graph Processing devroom:

• replaced: Bio4j talk by 'Birds of a feather - Graph processing, future trends!' at 11:10

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FOSDEM is almost upon us.

We will begin building up the ULB campus on Friday at 13:00. If you are around and want to help out, do join us!

Most work could be finished by 18:00, if you are hesitating to join in the late-afternoon, check this post whether that's still needed.

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The PGP Keysigning participants list is online.

We had a slight (or not so slight) typo in one of the room names up to now: "U.218A" is actually UA2.118 (aka "Henrion").
Unfortunately, the room name will remain wrong in the booklet which is distributed to all visitors at the infodesks.

Despite having a lot more sessions this year (around 430 as compared to 320 in 2011 and 2010), we managed to cram it all into 4 A4 pages for you to print. It provides an almost convenient overview of all the sessions for you to plan your weekend at the conference.

The PDF is available here.

The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium is predicting exceptionally cold weather for Saturday and Sunday. As it will be cold outside, while possibly very warm in some devrooms, make sure your clothing has multiple layers. This way, you won't freeze to death or sweat like a pig. Hopefully.

To finish our collection of informative interviews with the FOSDEM 2012 main track speakers, we proudly present:

• Juan David Gonzalez Cobas and Javier Serrano (open hardware)
• Bryan Østergaard (community management)
• Ben Klang (Adhearsion)
• Soren Hansen (monitoring)
• Kristian Høgsberg (Wayland)
• Anil Madhavapeddy (UNIX I/O)
• Carl-Daniel Hailfinger (coreboot)
• Claire Corgnou (average Jane and Joe)

See you at FOSDEM this weekend!

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As previously announced, FOSDEM will be streaming video for a select number of our rooms, in WebM and Theora codecs.

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LPI holds an open attendance item development workshop for the new exam "Linux Essentials" on Sunday. G. Matthew Rice, Director of Product Development at LPI, will guide this workshop.
For further information, please read the details here.

the following social media accounts are available for FOSDEM2012

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/fosdem

twitter:

@fosdem

http://twitter.com/#!/fosdem

Hashtag #fosdem

there have been some requests from people attending FOSDEM that would like to go to the Betagroup Coworking to work on Friday and Monday. So they thought that it would be a good idea to host as many partcipants as they could... for
free!

Please see details and signup info here:
http://coworking.betagroup.be/hosting-the-fosdem-participants/ Space is limited and signup will be disabled when they reach their limit.

The Polish are angry about ACTA. Rightly so, just like the rest of the world should have been. Thank you Poland! And let's hope your protest actually makes some difference.

Here is the third batch of interviews with our main track speakers:

• Bdale Garbee (FreedomBox)
• Finne Boonen (healthy communities)
• Guido Trotter (Ganeti)
• Wim Godden (caching and tuning)
• Simon Phipps (OSI)
• Renzo Davoli (Internet of Threads)
• Garrett Serack (CoApp)

read more

This year the ULB has kindly offered us the use of an additional new building on their campus. It's the K building and it's located on the other side of the parking from the Janson Lecture hall.

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Here is the second batch of interviews with our main track speakers:

• Michael Meeks (LibreOffice)
• Carsten Munk (mobile Linux)
• Kir Kolyshkin (OpenVZ)
• Robert Dewar (commercial success)
• Carsten Haitzler (EFL)

read more

This year, we will provide two meeting rooms (aka "BoF rooms") in the AW building. The idea here is that they are provided for unplanned or, rather, spontaneously planned and brief meetups.

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FOSDEM 2012 is almost upon us, and we're looking for motivated people to help us make it a success again. If you've visited FOSDEM in the past, you've probably seen our enthusiastic army of volunteers that helped us make FOSDEM a pleasant experience for all our visitors. If you want to be a part of this great team, here's your chance to sign up!

read more

LPI, BSDCG and TYPO3 will again provide FOSDEM attendees with the possibility of taking their respective certification exams.
Head over to this page for further details.

Web of Trust

PGP public key identification is based on multiple (the more the better) people doing an identification check against official identity documents such as driving permits, passports, national identity cards, etc.: the Web of Trustworthy. The Web of Trust is a reciprocal process: people identify themselves to each other.

The "keysigning party" is essential to strengthen the Web of Trust and keep the security technique open and freely available.

Like previous years, there will be a PGP key signing party at FOSDEM 2012, as well as a CAcert assurance party.

read more

Not coming to FOSDEM? Want to participate anyway? Do not despair! This year, the FOSDEM team is proud to announce the availability of streaming video from a select number of our rooms, in cooperation with the DebConf video team.

Thanks to the support of Fluendo, we'll be able to provide you with Ogg Theora and WebM versions of our streams.

Details on where and how to access these streams will be posted later as FOSDEM draws nearer. Watch this space!

Just like previous editions we have performed some interviews with our main track speakers.

To get up to speed with the various topics discussed in the main track talks, you can start reading the following interviews, one with a keynote speaker, three from the development track and two from the hypervisor track:

• Carlos Sanchez (DevOps)
• David Chisnall (LLVM)
• Paolo Bonzini (KVM)
• Lars Wirzenius (distro development)
• Sasha Levin (native KVM tool)
• Sylvain Lebresne (Apache Cassandra)

read more

This year we again received plenty of interesting lightning talk proposals.

See below for the list of 32 talks that will present themselves during 15 minutes in our special lightning talk track.

read more

35 Free and Open Source projects will be present at FOSDEM 2012 with a stand.
Note that this effectively ends the call for stands phase.

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Companies will be again able to inform visitors about open source employment or contracting opportunities in our "job corner" at FOSDEM 2012.

There are some rules on what is permissible, as outlined below, but most important is to use your common sense.

read more

A first batch of confirmed sessions (main tracks and keynotes) are now online in the schedule section of the site.

We invite any and all open source projects to participate in FOSDEM 2012 with a talk in a devroom, a lightning talk or by manning a stand.
Lightning talks are aimed at projects that do not fit in one of the devrooms.

2011-12-26

Stands	announcement	2011-12-13
Lightning talks	announcement	2011-12-16 (extended)
If an announcement is missing, ask devrooms@fosdem.org for the contact address.
Devroom name	Call for talks	Deadline
Ada	announcement
BSD licensed operating systems	announcement	-
Configuration and Systems Management	announcement	2011-12-31
Cross Desktop	announcement	2011-12-20
Distribution Miniconf	announcement	2011-12-22
Embedded	announcement	2012-01-15
Free Java	announcement	2011-12-30
Graph Processing	announcement	2011-01-05
Hardware Security and Cryptography	announcement
Jabber/XMPP	announcement
JBoss.org	announcement
Legal Issues	announcement	2011-12-30
LibreOffice	announcement
Mono	announcement	2011-12-31
Mozilla	announcement	2011-12-31
Multiserver, microkernel-based operating systems	announcement	2011-12-31
MySQL and Friends	announcement
Open Mobile Linux	announcement	2011-12-31
Open Source Game Development	announcement	2011-12-23
Open Source Telephony	announcement	2011-12-09
Open Source Virtualization and Cloud	announcement	2011-12-23
Perl	announcement
PostgreSQL	announcement	2011-12-20
Smalltalk	announcement	2011-12-31
World of GNUstep	announcement
X.org and OpenICC	announcement

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FOSDEM will be held the 4th and 5th of February 2012 in Brussels, Belgium. As usual and for the 9th time there will be an embedded and mobile room.

For this years program we are looking for people who would like to do a presentation about their or their community's projects in this area.
These projects must be Free Software or Open Source.

read more

Yep, I'm running for the privilege of being on the openSUSE board again. Lots of fine candidates this time, which is pretty cool in its own right.

I finally managed to fill out the remaining bits of my election platform page, so if you're interested, please have a read -- yes, I know, it's long ;)

The short summary:

• I care about the contributors, their environment, it must be a fun place where people feel comfortable, with friends
• I care a lot about the people aspects of the project, probably even more so than for the technical bits
• I believe that I have a few ideas on concrete things we (and specifically, but not only, the board) should get involved in

All that "I, I, I" comes quite tedious, to be honest, and I'm under the impression that I'm bragging around, which is something my inner beast is spanking me for, endlessly. But well, the whole purpose is specifically to explain what each candidate proposes so I guess it's fine.

So if you adhere to what I wrote there and/or if you trust me to do the right things, do vote for me -- don't think that oh well, I'll be elected anyway, if everybody thinks like that, I won't ;D

Since 2009, FOSDEM hires professional guides to offer a free guided tours of Brussels for the spouses/partners.If he/she would like to accompany you, and is not interested in the FOSDEM conference, this will make the stay worthwhile. Brussels is a city with a rich historical past, and a cosmopolitan present.

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Lightning Talks are your chance for 15 minutes of fame: every free or open source project can apply for giving a lightning talk at FOSDEM.
Our goal is to offer all the projects that do not fit in a specific main track or devroom the opportunity to speak. During exactly 15 minutes, one person gets to present the project or any aspect of it. All the lightning talks happen in a large room that can host up to 300 people.

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Just sent out the ack/nack emails for the developer rooms at FOSDEM 2012, the latter part always being pretty tough, but we have to make choices.

On the good side: here is the list of the devrooms for FOSDEM 2012.

Mind you, that list does not include the Distribution Miniconf, which will take place in two rooms during both days and will gather sessions, talks, ideas from many (mostly Linux) distribution projects.

So, finally, with some delay, here is the list of the devrooms that will be present on the schedule of FOSDEM 2012, in no particular order

Note that this obviously ends the call for devrooms.

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The gpodder project introduced its new major release 3.0.0 today and, unfortunately, it seems like I didn't pay attention to the complete change announcement, as I just bumped the gpodder package in Packman to 3.0.0 (from 2.18).

Now, gpodder 3.0.0 does introduce a lot of changes, notably in the UI but also regarding its database format and requires migrating the database from 2 to 3. It doesn't seem to have all of the features of 2.20 either. So what happens is that when you just upgrade the gpodder package, you end up with something you don't necessarily want to use. At least as of now.

Upstream will still maintain the 2.x branch for quite a while, and gradually port features from 2 to 3 and, hence, it actually makes sense to do it differently. What I have done now is to revert the gpodder package at Packman to the 2.xx branch (and upgrade to 2.20 at the same time).

If you want to use gpodder 3.0.0, then just install the package gpodder3 instead: zypper or YaST2 will tell you to remove gpodder in order to do so, as you cannot have both installed at the same time (they have file conflicts).

Now, if, in between those changes, you already did the upgrade, do one of the following:

• if you want to keep using 3.x: then run rpm -e gpodder && zypper install gpodder3 (as root)
• if you want to go back to 2.x: then run rpm -e gpodder && zypper install gpodder (as root)

On a side note, please wait a couple of hours (after this blog post) before doing so, as our main repository server is only synced to some mirrors after 4 hours (after 1 hour for most though).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The additional repository devel:languages:perl has quite a slew of Perl module packages in it (over 2000 at the time of writing).

Hence, if you are often using and requiring Perl modules, it makes a lot of sense to add it to your list of repositories, which you can do with the following command (as root):

zypper addrepo http://r.opensu.se/devel:languages:perl.repo

(if you wonder what r.opensu.se is, read up on it here: r.opensu.se).

A little known fact is that when building RPM packages, there is a post-build script that analyzes the files that are part of the resulting package in order to scan for Perl modules. For each of those Perl modules, it adds a Provides with the Perl name of that Perl module, with a specific notation which is like this: perl(Name::of::the::Perl::package).

As an example, if you need the Perl module Net::SMTP::SSL, you just need to do this:

zypper install 'perl(Net::SMTP::SSL)'

Note that you should indeed put that parameter to the zypper install command into quotes, as if you don't, bash will attempt to interpret the braces and give a syntax error.

Now, in this case, it is fairly simple, as the Perl module Net::SMTP::SSL is provided by the RPM package perl-Net-SMTP-SSL (at least on openSUSE/SLE), so you might have been able to derive the name of the RPM package from the name of the missing Perl module on your own. But that Perl module could very well be part of a package with a different name: for example, the Perl module Class::MOP is not in the RPM package perl-Class-MOP but in the RPM package perl-Moose (because it's part of the Moose CPAN module).

And a last little trick: if you only want to find out which RPM package(s) provides specific Perl modules, you may also use this:

zypper what-provides 'perl(Class::MOP)'

(Note that this one only works on repositories that you have in your list of active repositories, which you can see with zypper repos or zypper lr.)

(update: Migrated the code to GitHub and implemented minor improvements.)

It has finally happened: this blog is migrated away from Drupal to Blogger. My reason to move towards Blogger (and thus not away from Drupal) is very simple: No need to patch/update the application.
An important thing for me is that I wanted to keep all my blogposts, timestamps and comments. Unfortunately it looks like most people move away from Blogger towards Drupal and the web is full of code and information to export your data from Blogger in XML and then import it into Drupal.
But information how to upload everything into Blogger was nihil.
So I wrote a php script to do the export while keeping:

• posts
• comments
• tags / categories 
• publishing date

However there are a few quircks.

• Comments are (partially) anonymized because of a security feature of Blogger
• URLs are not customizable, so you will create dead links
• Images are not changed or imported. So manual work is still necessary

To use this script first create your blog into Blogger, create a test posts and export it to XML. Then run my php script and copy paste the output towards the bottom of the XML, where your test post is located.
Save the file and import it again in Blogger. It usually takes some time, but in the end you get the message that everything is imported correctly.

The code to do this is located here: https://github.com/cvandeplas/inet_scripts/blob/master/drupal_to_blogger.php .

There is a rather convenient way to mount ISO files (CD/DVD images) onto a directory on Linux, which goes as follows:
mount -o loop,ro /path/to/image.iso /path/to/mountpoint
(where the mountpoint is a directory).

This method works very well, but has one essential drawback: you must be root in order to do that. So how do I get to do so as a regular user ?

A barely known alternative lies in fuseiso, which uses the FUSE filesystem in user-space layer to accomplish that.

In order to use it, you must install the package fuseiso, which is available with the openSUSE distribution, and from the release repository (e.g. for 11.4) as well as from the filesystems repository and OBS project:
zypper install fuseiso

Once that has been done (as root ;)), you can simply mount ISO files like this, without being root:
fuseiso /path/to/image.iso /path/to/mountpoint

Note that as an additional benefit, fuseiso also supports images in NRG, BIN, MDF and IMG (dd) format, as well as zisofs.

In order to unmount, simply use fusermount -u, e.g. like this:
fusermount -u /path/to/mountpoint

Some time ago I wrote a simple script to automagically download TV episodes from the "revoir" functionality from the website of the RTBF.
That first script was rather unstable, so I analyzed the HTTP flow occurring while playing a video manually and wrote a lot more stable script that seems to work for some time.
The rtbf_tv_series_downloader.py script is available on a github repository.

How is it working?

1. The XML feed with the latest episodes is fetched.
2. From that file the unique id is extracted.
3. That unique id is used to download the JSON file for that episode.
4. In that JSON file a full download url is available.
5. That file is downloaded and saved to the disk. Only if it was not yet on the disk.

Just before my holiday I got a new mail from Packt publishing to read a new book of theirs about Wireless Penetration Testing. Perfect to read on a sunny beach.

As this book is directed towards beginners I tried to read and review it with beginners eyes. Like their other book I was positively surprised to see a name I knew. The author Vivek Ramachandran not only gave a Wireless Pentesting training at BruCON, but is also known for his work on wireless security.

Content
The book has nine chapters starting with info how to build your lab, and what kind of hardware is required to more advanced attacks like Mis-Association, Caffe Latte, and breaking WPA-Enterprise.

I wouldn't compare this book to a standard book you read, because this book would be more a training manual teaching you some (basic) theory and then giving you lab exercises (or vice-versa). This is a great thing for geeks like me that remember by doing, and not by reading.

The disappointing bit was the lack of cryptographic theory. I think it is rather important to not only learn to use a tool with its command line options, but it's also important to know what the differences are between PTW and FMS attacks, and why it's possible to do ARP replays while the packets are encrypted. (Answer: because an ARP packet has a fixed length it can be recognized even being encrypted.)

As I am more experienced half of the book was a quick read, however the second half was a lot more pleasing as it taught me things I didn't know. (or forgot because of a lack of practice)

Conclusion
If you don't have experience with Wireless Cracking/Penetration Testing this book is definitely a must-read. I do advice however that you open Wikipedia and the site of Aircrack when reading trough WLAN Encryption Flaws (Chapter 4) to better understand the cryptographics.
Don't forget to buy a wireless card supporting monitor mode and packet injection while ordering this (e)book.

If you want to read a bit have a look at the free sample chapter.

FOSDEM is probably the largest free and non-commercial open source event, taking place in Brussels, Belgium on 4 and 5 February 2012. Being a developer-oriented conference, it is the open source communities and developers that make it what it is.

With our first round of calls for participation, we invite experienced speakers and linux distributions to apply.

In a second round, we will send out a call for stands, lightning talks (short talks) and you will be able to submit talks to the individual devrooms.

The following calls are open in this round:

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We are still in the process of reviewing the requests, please bear with us.

The goal of the main tracks is to host high-quality seminars for a broad and technical audience. Every track is organized around a theme (security, kernel, collaboration, ...) and contains 3 seminars. The main tracks are held in the two biggest rooms, giving a seat to 550 and 1400 visitors.

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So it's openSUSE 12.1 Beta 1 testing time !

Before filing new bugs, make sure you search for existing bugs first.

If you're as annoyed by Bugzilla's search interface as I am, you can use this page to search for 12.1 Beta 1 bugs: just type in keywords and done.

The page also has an opensearch descriptor in order to add 12.1 Beta bug search to the list of search engines in your favorite browser.

In licht tot extreem sterk stijgende volgorde van ergernis:

• Roomijsventers die de twee bollen in de foute volgorde opscheppen
• Broodzakken die openscheuren als je ze aan het fietsstuur vasthoudt
• Douches die op koud springen als ge met uw gat tegen de kraan stoot
• Landen die onterecht veroordeelden koudweg executeren

Zie ook een eerdere aflevering

So here we go again, FOSDEM, the largest and coolest open source contributor event in Europe is prepping up for its 2012 edition.

I've just opened the Call for Developer Rooms, the deadline for submissions is 2011-10-27.

Other call-for-stuffs will open very soon (lightning talks, stands, main tracks).

A devroom is a room in which projects can organize their own schedule, composed of presentations, brainstorming and hacking sessions. The goal is to stimulate developer collaboration and cross-pollination between projects.

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