Ministry of Inferiors

I now have a new “geek fanzine” called “Where’s my fucking jet pack“. This is where I write when I have some spare time, so don’t expect new stuff here in the near future (at least until the novelty wears off 🙂 ).

Come visit me there.

Just the other post I said

who do you identify me as? If it’s not something publicly known, it’s meaningless. Identifying me as The Dod only means “I’ve met a guy who called himself The Dod”. Perhaps it’s another person who really calls himself that.

Turns out this guy exists. He pronounces it dee oh dee, while I pronounce it “dude with an o for a u and no e“, but you wouldn’t know that from reading text. 🙂

He’s funny. Here’s a video:

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Originally, this post tried to propose a where some people would only learn to generate their key-pair at the party. Bottom line, it was a bad idea. I propose an alternative idea (although it’s probably not worth the hassle).

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I’m already old enough to have a really bad memory (just got my retirement visa, mind you), but this is ridiculous: I’m installing a plain-vanilla-apt-get couchdb, add a few users, give them roles, and then I get to the point where I want to disable signups. Sure I can dive into the validate_doc_update() at the _users db, stress my feeble mind out and figure out what to change there, but since this is a security issue, I’d rather do this by the book. The only question is, of course, where’s the book? Turns  out I wrote it 🙂

In our fast-paced world “Steal this Film” is already a historical documentary, produced in the naive days when there was still belief that legal systems around the world were loosely bound by morals (or at least common sense). Still, it’s a must-watch. Let me try to convince you in 2 minutes 🙂

You too can steal this film if you want to cut/paste/remix it.

I have written some thoughts I had regarding Cryptocat. Apparently, they were wrong. I leave this post here (to my shame) because some places link here and some people have commented here, but It’s no longer relevant.

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Whatmail is a stand-alone (cgi) contact-form written in Python. It has the following features:

• Supports Unicode international characters (למשל עברית)
• Has recaptcha spambot protection
• Fully skinnable with mustache templates (so you can easily make it look like the rest of the site)
• Can gpg-encrypt the mail it sends (only makes sense if the form is served via SSL)

The code is here. You can see it in action (and send me something secret) here. סקין עברי.

I like to have my projects as self contained git repositories, with submodules for all dependencies. This way we have “one git submodule update to rule them all”. The downside of this approach is that you need to have git mirrors for everything that doesn’t have a git repository, and the problem with 1:1 non-git mirrors is that they don’t come with a .gitignore file :).

Once you run the code, git status starts warning you about untracked content in the submodule (For example *.pyc files for python). We need to add a .gitignore file, but that would be untracked content too 🙂

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