This is the archive for September 2007. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

Hackergotchi for Reinout

Sunday, September 30, 2007 ★ 19:32 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Dear Reinout,

As requested, here’s a hackergotchi for you:

Hackergotchi for Reinout

Here’s the Gimp file, if you want to play with it some more.

Securely remove files with shred

Monday, September 10, 2007 ★ 23:26 ★ Category Linux ★ Permanent url

Miguel,

Your script to edit a temporarily decrypted file, which is automatically encrypted after you’re done editing uses a primitive method to remove the temporary decrypted data. Using vi’s no-backup mode is a smart thing to do (it disables all backup files and undo caches), but the file itself is just overwritten once. Try shred instead: shred -u tmpfile.txt. Note that this is not 100% safe either: your filesystem might keep the unencrypted data somewhere, e.g. in the journal, on a network disk, or in a filesystem snapshot.

My personal opinion is that shred is good enough for me on (local) disks. See for yourself.

Update: If you want some (or all) of your applications to securely remove files, you might want to try libsd instead. This shared library goes into your LD_PRELOAD path and replaces some of the standard C functions like open() and truncate() with overwrite-with-random-data equivalents. Note that this severely reduces system performance. Thanks to Folkert van Heusden for the pointer.

Hackergotchi for zeenix

Friday, September 7, 2007 ★ 21:56 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Dear ذیشان ءلی (Zeeshan Ali),

As requested, here’s a hackergotchi for you:

Hackergotchi for zeenix

Here’s the Gimp file, if you want to play with it some more.

Gnome Specimen 0.3.1 is out!

Thursday, September 6, 2007 ★ 19:00 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Update: Gnome Specimen 0.4 is out

I have just released Gnome Specimen 0.3.1, your favourite tool for previewing and comparing fonts on your Gnome desktop.

Gnome Specimen

This is just a maintenance release.

Changes since 0.3:

IKEA uses hackergotchis

Thursday, September 6, 2007 ★ 11:26 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url

I just found out that the (Dutch) IKEA site uses hackergotchi pictures of their designers.

Ikea uses hackergotchis

Holiday pictures of Crete

Tuesday, September 4, 2007 ★ 23:26 ★ Categories Photography, Travelling ★ Permanent url

I’m back from Κρήτη (Crete). Mostly relaxed; I did not do much besides attending a wedding party (and getting slightly drunk), visiting Spinalonga and reading in a few books (both unfinished):