Infodrom Oldenburg

Scribus is a good start but there's still a lot of work to do.

The other day I was thinking of a geek thriller where geek skills and knowledge about network and operating systems as well as their problems (dos, information leakage, breakable encryption etc.) would be used to elucidate a crime with the help of geeks.

I could think about mentioning things like: capturing ones' monitor by using high frequency waves, hijacking telnet sessions, grabbing passwords, ssl encryption, locating somebody by using triometric methods while his mobile phone is turned on, reading traces of the criminal through various logfiles, using known and partially fixed security holes, locating somebody who uses a stolen mobile phone etc.

The genre would be "science and fiction thriller", it should mention and use techniques that could be possible by extending our current technology, that may be used in 5-20 years, not so far in the future. Also Free Software geeks should be the good guys who help the police and also warn the reader not to depend on the technology too much since it can be used against him as well.

Currently links are never tested. This is bad since some urls may move or even expire. Thus they should be tested. As first try they could simply be fetched with wget/perl-LWP. As second try one could think about fetching the entire file and comparing it with an already stored version (or better HEAD it and check its modification time). It could be important to find out if the file was changed recently.

Much information is compacted into the per-file structure that may be used by the client in reconstructing the directory tree. In spirit it is like the common ls-lR files that mirrors have, but in practice it is radically different, most striking is that it is stored in a compacted binary format and may optionally contain MD5 hashes.

Now, there is no list of hard drives, if one fails, where is it from? What's the RMA number? What's its ID? Or the other way around you're looking for that damn 1gig drive from five years ago you've borrowed from a friend. Where the hell is it now?

As long as this is only your private stuff, it's not that critical, but what happens if you also run a company and a non-commercial association or a free software project that runs a couple of machines around the net?

The system needs to be db/sql-based and support a web-frontend. For sure, some lists need to be generated by commandline tools, maybe also inserts.

I'll provide a figer as soon as I find some time to think about the exact requirements.

Now what happens is, hypermail tries to write that new file as 0210.html instead of 0346.html. Why? Wouldn't it be more expectable that the file 0210.html would be ignored and a new file would be created? Especially since writing to 0210.html fails?

When hypermail tries to find out the new filename it stops looking when the first file occurs that it couldn't open. It should check for file existance instead.

1. There is a typo in the url, so where's the proper spelling?
2. The page has been moved, so where's the new page?
3. The page has been expired, so is there another one we can link to?

To help the translators, there is a new script which can be used to extract the bad links for a given translation from a file. It can be found at http://people.debian.org/~treacy/urlcheck/scripts/extract_lang.pl
Example usage: ./extract_lang.pl es releases/potato

One thing that people may find annoying is that the script which checks the links is set to time out after only 15 seconds (otherwise the script takes forever to run). These are all listed in the files, so don't be afraid if a file looks daunting due to its size.

Auf den Webseiten sollte erklärt werden, wie und in welcher Höhe Firmen Spenden an den ffis e.V. absetzen können. Wenn ich mich recht entsinne, werden Spenden an gemeinnützige Organisationen vom zu versteuernden Gewinn abgezogen. Die Höhe darf jedoch nur bis zu 10% des Gewinns ausmachen (o.ä.).

Das müßte recherchiert und festgehalten werden, damit Firmen es leichter haben zu spenden, denn sie wissen dann gleich, wie sie die Spenden absetzen können.

Ich habe mehrfach Anfragen aus Richtung Linux-Community/Linux New Media AG erhalten, ob wir sie nicht mit (übersetzten) Artikeln füttern können oder einen Debian-Bereich auf www.linux-community.de pflegen können. Ich (Joey) persönlich kann das nicht, meine Zeit reicht dafür nicht aus. Mehrere Anfragen auf die deutsche Debian-Liste sowie privat haben leider auch niemanden bzw. keine Gruppe von Personen zutage gebracht, die an der Stelle etwas PR für das Projekt leisten möchten.

Ähnliches gilt übrigens auch für andere Web-Foren.