FAI - Fully Automatic Installation - since we have a lot of chroots and virtual machines at the company, maybe quite interesting.
sysadmin - 8.4.2009 - 4.11.2009
Electric Alchemy: Cracking Passwords in the Cloud: Breaking PGP on EC2 with EDPR - interesting article about brute-force cracking of passwords using dynamic instances on Amazon EC2. Particularly interesting is the second part with the analysis of the costs of this solution depending on password complexity and length. 8-character passwords (even with special characters and numbers) are definitely no longer up-to-date for really sensitive data.
Apple cancels ZFS project - why Apple dropped ZFS.
rlwrap - nice little tool that brings readline support to any command line application. With this, you can also edit lines in Clojure in a somewhat reasonable way (though it can of course only support line editing, not editing of logically related expressions).
Cloud Data Blown Away for Sidekick Users - "T-Mobile advises its customers that have cached data not to run out of power, restart, or shut down their Sidekicks, lest the last chance of recovery would be lost." - reality provides the best parodies!
Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data - ok, I don't use the guest account, but maybe someone out there does. If so, better read here first, before the data is gone.
Thawte revokes personal email certificates - oh yes, I still remember the silly discussions that Verisign and Thawte as central signature authorities were much more trustworthy than the grassroots web-of-trust with PGP at that time. Funny, PGP (and now gpg) keys still work and will continue to work. And since a real web-of-trust was established there, it doesn't matter if a server in the gpg signature chain is shut down. But of course, the commercial certificates are much better ...
I like Unicorn because it's Unix - good overview of a pre-forking web server in Ruby. Something like this based on the existing tools for Python would be nice. Maybe I should tackle my toolserver again and switch to multiprocessing and rebuild the whole communication stuff around processes.
EC2 and Ubuntu - Alestic.com - ready-made AMIs for setting up Ubuntu-based EC2 instances.
Winclone - because I've been wondering all the time how I can properly back up my Bootcamp partition - this makes it simple and easy from OS X (which is where I spend most of my time).
Log-structured file systems: There's one in every SSD - interesting article about SSDs and their performance behavior. Particularly interesting from the perspective that SSDs are increasingly being tried as an alternative to high-performance disk systems.
sink - nice little tool for comparing directories (even more than two) and synchronizing.
lsyncd - could be quite nice for some purposes. Basically a live-rsync - for example, for automatically distributing config files in our production cluster, it might be quite good, as you no longer have to wait for the cronjobs.
Webber - saw the link on the shockwave. Sounds interesting and looks quite Pythonic.
Welcome To Tahoe-LAFS - an interesting project for truly secure online storage (secure in the sense that "none of the providers can mess with the data or read it").
Pressflow makes Drupal scale - hmm, a fork of Drupal with a special focus on scalability. Unfortunately, there is a restriction to MySQL - I would have preferred PostgreSQL. But the approach of building a fork with a special focus on scalability is commendable. Although Drupal itself could also achieve this (and aims to do so from version 7 onwards).
Varnish - had I already heard of that? No idea, doesn't matter, sounds very interesting. A reverse proxy with powerful configuration and edge side includes (with which you can mix things at the proxy level). This could be very interesting at work - we mostly use non-caching Apache for such purposes, varnish could solve a lot for which we always have to build wild mod perl or mod python hacks or dive into Apache configuration orgies.
Booting Windows XP From An External Drive - oh man, this is really crap what Windows offers. I would like to move the 20G partition for Bootcamp to an external drive since I hardly ever use XP anyway. But it's almost easier to give the MBP a larger drive than to jump through these silly hoops to get XP on a USB drive ...
The Dropbox Blog - iPhone Sneak Peek! - the best (ok, I think it's the best) online storage is getting even better with an upcoming iPhone app that allows you to quickly and easily access your data (and keep favorites for offline use). Exactly what I need, as I now use Dropbox constantly for all kinds of data transfers between computers.
Comparing Mongo DB and Couch DB - interesting comparison between two of the more well-known document-oriented databases.
gitit - actually a quite simple idea: a wiki that is based directly on a version control system and works only with text formats. By using Git or Darcs, distributed collaboration on a shared wiki becomes possible. Or staging of content. Or many other things that only become possible through real version control.
MongoDB - keep an eye on this one, of the NoSQL databases this is one of the more interesting.
NoSQL: If Only It Was That Easy - interesting overview of existing NoSQL storages from the perspective of scaling.
PawelPacana/MercurialBackend/Configuration - MoinMoin - and apparently there is a Mercurial backend for MoinMoin, which makes sense as both are written in Python. That would be interesting, MoinMoin is already quite interesting on its own and Mercurial is my favorite version control software.
up and running with cassandra - and an article about a second quite interesting NoSQL database. In this case, particularly interesting is the high and simple scalability.
RubyFrontier Documentation - worth a look, might eventually renovate my nanoblogger blog. Found on Schockwelle.
CAS | Jasig Community - SSO server with plugin structure for authentication and a wide range of client libraries.
pam_python - write PAM modules in Python - not entirely uncool for coupling various systems for authentication.
SSO free of charge - Article on how to use CAS.
One bug to rule them all - JavaScript, cross-platform. Wow.
Tablet-Netbook from Asus for 450 Euros - doesn't sound so uninteresting. Could you also install OS X on it like the little 901?
Google veröffentlicht freien NX-Server - interestingly, some parts are written in Python!
Judgment: DSL-Sharing via WLAN violates competition law - well, that should probably be the end of FON in Germany (at least if the judgment holds). Well, it never really took off here anyway.
Dead Media Beat: CompuServe - CompuServe is done.
In our own interest: Power outage in the data center stopped heise online - well, I would have expected something different from Heise.
iPhone to Get SMS Vulnerability Fix - autsch. autsch. autsch.
Subdomain-Patent null and void - one of the most ridiculous patents finally gone. This should never have been granted.
New investor saves SCO from liquidation - Zombies!
AK deletes 60 child porn sites in 12 hours - and why can't our Ursula do that?
Roland Schulz: SSH ProxyCommand without netcat - very nice hack on how to get over ssh gateways without netcat and without intermediate stops.
Lamson: Lamson The Python SMTP Server - interesting project, especially if you plan to build on email as an interface.
Gluster - interesting cluster filesystem under free license.
SCO should be liquidated - will we actually not get any more silly SCO vs. Linux stories in the foreseeable future? Amazing!
Packet Garden - a nice graphical toy that generates virtual landscapes from network traffic data. And there's also the Python source code, so you can learn about network programming and Python at the same time.
Mothers Ruin Software: Suspicious Package - interesting tool to quickly take a look at installation packages with QuickLook without having to start them.
Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - oops. IBM must be in a bad mood now ...
Mac-Bot-Netz? - not that I would believe the nonsense about the "unassailable MacOS X" that some Apple disciples spread (Hello Apple - could we maybe get more detailed update descriptions beyond "improves compatibility and increases stability"? Thanks!), but would I necessarily believe a store that has always tried to sell strange products to Apple owners and has always tried to spread panic and purchases of its software with more than questionable press releases?
Discount — a C implementation of the Markdown markup language - the title says it all. Looks good, and should be many times faster than the other markdown implementations - which would also make it interesting for live use. And Markdown is many times simpler than Docutils (Restructured Text).
Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 - interesting article about scaling with Amazon's Elastic Cloud.