Martin Geisler Online

Yesterday, at the exercise class for the course on Security and Fault-tolerance in Distributed Systems, Christian Cachin booted his laptop to show us some graphs explaining how the sophistication of onlin attacks have gone up, while the level of knowledge necessary to execute these attacks have dropped.

His laptop was running Debian and I noticed that the image of the Debian Swirl in his version of GDM has a little white border around it. And this is exciting for me because I made that border! :-) Or at least I filled wishlist bug #201303 against the gdm package, which the maintainer then accepted. It’s very cool to see something like this — even though it’s a purely cosmetic thing.

Last week I attended a number of diffeernt courses, some of them were really interesting, some of them not so. Since there were no exercise classes last week I had some more time than usual, so I litterally jumped into different lectures as I found out about them at the course catalog.

During so I discovered some new interesting lectures that I will be following: Security and Fault-tolerance in Distributed Systems in which we’ll take a more detailed look at the difficulities in keeping large distributed systems online. In the course on Language-Based Security we will look at stuff like proof-carying code and static security analysis. It’s going to be interesting to see how this stuff actually works — so far I’ve only heard about it as some sort of theoretical result, but it seems that it can actually be implemented. The last new course is also about security, specifically about E-Privacy: Privacy in the Electronic Society. The first lecture I attended was a bit dull, dealing only with the laws and regulations in this field (standards and recommentations for privacy policies on websites) but the lecturer promissed me that it would become more “hard-core” later on.

I’ll update my calendar later when I get time — it’s quite boring to make (X)HTML tables by hand when you’ve tried making them using the PhpWiki syntax or something similar.

The McDonald’s here in Switzerland look pretty much like they do in Denmark, except that they all carry advertisments for some sort of special Swiss raclette burger. Being hungry and curious I decided gave it a try.

Having ordered a medium sized menu for 13 CHF I wondered — where is my ketchup for the Pommes Frites? Well, it seems you have to order that yourself. They’ve changed that back and forth in Denmark too, sometimes you could help yourself, at other times you got little plastic bags, and sometimes you even have to pay for them. Why cant they just make up their mind and decide on just giving it away?

Anyway… I was more interested in the Swiss burger. It was basically a piece of ciabatta bread with some sauce at the bottom, a piece of meat and some raclette-like cheese at the top. Not that interesting, IMHO. Next time I go to McDonald’s I think I’ll go for a BigMac or maybe I wont go there at all — I like Burger King better anyway. There’s just the one problem that I don’t think they are available in Switzerland.

I guess I’ll just have to go without fastfood then — it’s probably better in the long run too! :-)

Today I ordered some new books at Amazon or my new courses. I always love to buy books, for books are nice to have. Especially when they are interesting like these:

• Security in Computing by Charles R. Pfleeger and Shari Lawrence Pfleeger.
• Exploiting Software by Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw.
• Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer.

I’m really looking forward to receiving them.

I’m have finally brought my computer back online again — so now the title of this website is true once again :-) The first thing to do was to update my Debian installation with about 400 MiB of updates. I’m tracking the soon-to-be-stable “testing” distribution of Debian, which means that I receive bug fixes pretty quickly after they are found and committed to the “unstable” distribution. But it also means that a lot of updates pile up when my computer isn’t online.

I’m online through a Netopia ADSL router, which we could buy from Bluewin for 200 CHF. That included the PCMCIA card for Stéphanie’s computer as well, so I think the price is reasonable. The only minus is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any way of making the card run under Debian — I’ve searched a lot and tried all the tricks I know but nothing worked. So I guess Stéphanie will be limited to Windows for now.