Having heard (and seen) much about Microsoft Office 2007’s new UI, when I had the opportunity to have a look at Office 2007, I popped in the cd to check it out. That turned out to be a small nightmare. Read the rest of this entry »
Moving from MD5 to Blowfish on Debian/Ubuntu
By default, Debian & Ubuntu use MD5 to hash your passwords. While this is relatively secure, using Blowfish instead is (much?) better.
As I’m not a cryptographer, I have no idea how much better it is. But switching is incredibly easy, and there are no downsides, AFAIK. Follow along… Read the rest of this entry »
upgrade only vulnerable packages with apt
Since I’m using Debian Sid (unstable), every now and then, some stuff gets broken. I have no problem with that — using Sid, it’s expected behaviour. However, sometimes I *really* don’t have time for a broken setup, so I quit upgrading for a week or so.
The problem will be clear already to most: what with security-wise vulnerabe packages? What if that SSH version I’m not installing in fact contains a fix for a remote root exploit I’m not aware of?
Alky project dead?
A few months back, the Alky Project was announced. It got quite some attention in the media, blogs, etc., like this digg thread for example. The idea was the following: convert Windows binaries, so they would run on Mac and, in a later stage, on GNU/Linux. It was claimed that those converters were mostly working already, the only thing left was implement the libraries. This, of course, is an enormous work. But looking in its forum, the progress seemed there – the coders were actively working on it. The promises from the project’s founder were great:
tora with oracle on debian/ubuntu — prebuilt package
I’ve received much more requests for the prebuilt package than I originally thought — apparently this problem affects many people. As such, I’ve put the .deb package online: you can get it here.
tora with oracle on debian
Update: I’ve posted a new blog entry which contains the prebuilt package I mentioned.
Doing this is a mess. Oracle is non-free (as in freedom, not as in beer) so it can’t be included decently into Debian. It took me a few weeks to do is (not non-stop, of course, but I had to try it a couple of times). It’s a very a frustrating process — at least it was in my experience.
