After being an usenet junky for a long time the time came that I switched from being a regular poster to a lurker. I still followed a lot of groups for many years until I realised that I only was syncing my newsspool for at least 12 to 18 months without any reading. After some catching up on some groups I saw that I wasn’t the only person. A lot of groups in the nl-tree are just empty or mostly abandoned or they contained mostly spam. Other trees like the comp-tree has more posters, but also a lot more spam and I mean really a lot more.
I still think usenet is a good platform and that it has served it’s purpose. Due to it’s openness as a platform it also lead to a lot of people abusing it and it is unforgiving. One thing that companies like Microsoft, but also XS4ALL are switching to privately hosted forums where they can control the posters and the content. This leaves certain mailinglists for me to follow, but even that number has been reduced as most of them have the Eternal September feeling. So everyone thanks for all the time and discussions on Usenet and hopefully we meet again.
The migration of GNOME toward version 3.0 in Debian earlier this year wasn’t very successful in the beginning, but a lot of bugs where solved during the summer. GNOME 3.0 made it into Wheezy during the release of 3.2 and maybe for the better. Now only a few months after the release of GNOME 3.2 almost all packages have been uploaded to experimental or unstable, and most of them even already migrated to testing.
But what brings GNOME 3.2? A lot of people are unhappy and some of these points are valid and need to be fixed. Others can be discussed if they are true. One thing that changed in 3.2 is how GNOME interacts with your address book and your instant messaging accounts. Connections to instant messaging networks are automatically being started when you log in. This also reflects in the search screen when you type in a friends name and you direct see his connection status.
GNOME Online Accounts is another example of making things simpler for the user. Currently it only works for Google, but I really hope current proposals with querying the right SRV-records in DNS are also going to be part of GNOME in a future release. For now GNOME Online Accounts setups up multiple Google services up like Mail, Calendar, Chat, Documents and Contacts with a single authentication token. Different services don’t have to maintain and store the credentials in GNOME Keyring or in still in there own way. Hopefully there will come a solution for Liferea which still stores te users password plain-text in the configuration file.
Other third-party applications like Simple Scan, Shotwell and Deja-Dup are slowly making there way into becoming part of GNOME. I can’t wait to see what is going to happen with the GNOME 3.4 release as both Epiphany and Evolution are going to have some major work done to them. A switch to Webkit 2 and ending the usage of GtkHTML in Evolution. Hopefully after this Epiphany can replace Firefox completely on my desktop.
It is good to see the progress GNOME is making into becoming an interface for cloud services by simplifying the configuration for users, but also separating data from applications more and more. I can’t wait to see how GNOME Document is going to evolve, but two other things still open is a good solution for RSS-feeds and chat-logs as Empathy is still storing them on disk and isn’t able to use logs stored by Google for example.
In the end I’m happy with GNOME 3.2 in Debian Testing right now and Debian on my workstation is back to it’s weekly testing upgrade schedule as most parts are working. I even think that I will continue to do this during the 3.4 release as most of the GNOME dust has settled. Maybe I make an exception for both AbiWord and Gnumeric when they switch to GTK3 and hopefully also better OpenDocument support.
As my viewing port on the Internet has become an RSS-reader more and more during 2011 I also started to pay attention on the content presented. So during my Christmas break I’m going to remove some feeds from my RSS-reader. As side note, the compressed database dump grows with 1 megabyte between every 5 and 8 days now.
But the first feeds that have to go are websites or blogs that only present a snippet and hope you come to there website to continue reading the article. Some comments I have read why people do that is banners or hoping that you also read other content. For the first there are solutions to embed banners in your RSS-feed. The later is just b*llsh*t as that person is subscribed to your RSS-feed and how much more commitment do you want on reading your content?
What may be a problem is the experience people have reading your RSS-feed as a lot of sites, and yes I’m looking at you also WordPress, that do not include the right CSS in the feed. This is something that needs and can be solved. The other remark is notification and traffic and the question is if those are real issues with the use of a ping-servers and a distribution hubs. FeedBurner is one for example which can take the load of your website or blog. Load that was also there when they where forcing people towards your website.
I may sound hars, but I have to spent my time more wisely. With 125+ feeds in my reader and with a few of those being OPML-feeds it is really time to clean things up. It also makes me wonder how easy it would be to integrate certain features from Google Reader into TT-RSS to get figures how much you read and what you’re reading and what not. First the Christmas cleaning as it takes the backend about 30 days to stop fetching the feed after the last user unsubscribed.
In the past a lot of phishing was going towards customers of the Dutch bank Postbank. It continued for years and when the bank finally merged with ING the phishing attacks adopted the new name quickly. In both cases the bank was publishing closed SPF resource records in DNS so third party systems could determine of an e-mail really came from Postbank or ING. And with a few rules for SpamAssassin for example most of the phishing can be stopped.
The last months phishing attacks for both Rabobank and ABN Amro increased a lot. Most phishing e-mails from Rabobank are being caught by the bayesian filter for now, but for ABN Amro aren’t always detected. This makes me wonder why those banks don’t publish SPF resource records in DNS? Is it really that difficult? Or is the cost for fraude smaller, then for a denied e-mail?
Having everything in a digital form can have it downsides just like having your music on CD’s for example. Things may go wrong a give you bad data. Rhythmbox for example was complaining that a FLAC file couldn’t be recognized. This could be a corrupted FLAC file or that Gstreamer, the backend behind Rhythmbox, contained a bug.
After reading the manpage for FLAC it appears that there is a way to analyze a FLAC file. In the example below a FLAC file is being tested and it converts any warning into an error.
$ flac -w -t The\ Cranberries\ -\ 09\ -\ Copycat.flac
flac 1.2.1, Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007 Josh Coalson
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.
The Cranberries - 09 - Copycat.flac: ok
$
The file seems to be correct and starts the job to find the issue in Gstreamer or Rhythmbox.
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