Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category

openSUSE madness

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Just in case you wonder why a simple sudo zypper install sometimes loads dozens or more unneeded, but possibly related packages, its not a bug, its a feature! While Debian by default only hints you to these additional packages during the install phase, openSUSE installs them all by default. Try it ...

openSUSE build service client ported

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

I used to create packages for a couple of open source projects for the openSUSE Linux distribution. They have this really nice build service running on build.opensuse.org, on which you can - despite of its name - also build packages for other Linux distributions like Fedora, Gentoo or Debian. While the ...

Why the lucky stiff

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

I actually don't know where this guy got his name from, nor how exactly I stumbled upon him or his excellent book on Ruby, but one is for sure: He's one of those adorable people with more than one or two skills. You can already get this if you read ...

Read encrypted emails via webmail?

Friday, January 9th, 2009

I was recently asked how to read encrypted emails securely in some untrusted environment via webmail. Imagine you're sitting on someone else' computer and absolutely need to check your inbox for this one encrypted email which contains a password without which you can't continue. Or you're in some internet cafe ...

SSL Verification with Qt and a custom CA certificate

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

So I wanted to make my application updater for guitone SSL-aware the other day. The server setup was an easy job: Add the new domain (guitone.thomaskeller.biz) to cacert.org, create a new certificate request with the new SubjectAltName (and all the other, existing alternative names - a procedure where this script ...

Better than grep

Friday, July 11th, 2008

If you're a programmer and you're using a command line heavily, you've certainly come across a big nuisance in the usage of GNU's grep utility: The verbosity you need to exclude files from being searched, such as backup files (*~ or *#) or any kind of vcs inventory stupidity like ...

Little Nickname Science

Monday, May 26th, 2008

Its not that I'm a newbie, but sometimes I just feel that way. People start and talk in acronyms on IRC, and then it comes out that these acronyms stand for apparently famous people in the Free Software world I should know... Lets start with an easy one: rms. Yeah, that was ...

Perverted Logic / Monotone Summit

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

If you like to have a laugh today, read this. Found via Rob Weir's blog. The Monotone Summit goes on and its quite fun to meet and work with all the people I just know from IRC or the mailing list. I mostly worked on automation stuff so far and improved ...

A Linux tale… [updated]

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

My wife and I seem to share a lot of activities recently. We finally gathered a few friends around here with which we do regularily stuff like playing card games and she even got me to take Salsa dancing lessons with her. Beside that my political interests and meetings are ...

Taking appcasts to the next level

Saturday, August 4th, 2007

Appcasts are RSS feeds which make use of the <enclosure> tag which links to a binary file (usually a software package) somewhere on the internet.