Wed, 25. May 2005
Found a New Home

OK, I've done it, I now rent a root server.

The virtualized hosts that have been available looked as if they were highly underpowered. If you share a box with 256 MB of RAM with nine other customers this may or may not work - depends on what the others are doing. Many thanks to all who've responded to my question.

The machine runs SuSE - not exactly my favorite distro - and of course I managed to lock myself out with my very first attempts to use Yast. Far too many services running, too many ports open, and when I tried to change it somehow sshd wouldn't come back again (or my firewall rules have been too strict).

MTA is postfix, which should be OK once I learn my way around it. Spamassasin is installed as well. Apache2 with a load or modules as HTTPd. There also is a MySQL installation that might be needed by the installed confixx software, I'll need to find out.

Once the MTA is up and running the way I want it to work, I'll have to select a blogging backend and (manually, I'm afraid) import what I have. I'm torn between blosxom - which matches my workflow pretty well - and wordpress since it wouldn't require me to think about layouts and styles. I'm no designer at all, in case that isn't obvious from this site's look.

path: /en/personal/hosting | #

Wed, 18. May 2005
Looking into Hosting Alternatives

Even though I'm quite happy with blogger.de I consider buying a domain and getting a "real host" of my own. The main reason is that I want to get control over a mail-server of my own rather than a web-server. I want to get rid of spam and virus mails before I download them.

Probably my needs will grow with the new possibilities so I'll need administrative access to the machine (SSH, of course). On the other hand I do not want to be responsible for the core OS myself. Sounds as if a "managed root-server" or just a virtual machine (like a Solaris zone or a FreeBSD jail) would be fine. Disk-space requirements are low, but the bandwidth should keep up with new waves of virus mails - something like a few-thousand mails of 10 to 100k each count up quickly.

If you can recommend somebody - preferably in Germany, but any hoster who can deal with German banks and doesn't insist on a credit-card would work - please drop me a mail.

path: /en/personal/hosting | #

Wed, 11. May 2005
That Dirt Again

Received more than 1500 right-wing spam mails today (and counting) as well as more than 600 bounces so far. The same old pattern of spammers exploiting a virus and sending out their "message" abusing email addresses. Roul from Kapersky says it's Sober.Q this time.

Of course I still don't share the views of those idiots.

path: /en/malware/spam | #

Tue, 10. May 2005
commons-pgp
To: commons-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: [PGP] New Sandbox component
From: Stefan Bodewig 
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 10:34:59 +0200
Message-ID: 

Hi,

members of the Maven, Ant and Repository teams have been thinking
about adding PGP support to their respective projects for a while, but
so far neither of those projects has made any real attempt to do so.

Some discussion on the Ant dev list that involved Ant and Maven
committers lead to the idea of commons-pgp.

The goal is a library that provides a simple API to PGP sign files (or
streams?) and verify PGP signatures.  This may be extended to key
management or encryption/decryption later.  The idea is to start with
an implementation based on Bouncycastle's[1] library but keep the API
independent of it in order to allow different providers like
cryptix[2] to be written.

The library itself is supposed to be independent of either Ant or
Maven.

The initial set of committers will be Brett Porter, Matt Benson (who
is an Ant committer, I've just granted him commit access to the
sandbox) and myself, but more helping hands are certainly welcome.

So far all there is is a README file describing the purpose of the
component.  We probably should have an API sketch before we go further
than that.  Somebody with commons karma will have to add pgp to the
externals of trunks-sandox at one point.

Based on the projects involved the question probably won't be whether
we use Maven or Ant to build the project, we'll support both.  8-)

Cheers

        Stefan

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.bouncycastle.org/

[2]  http://www.cryptix.org/

path: /en/Apache/commons-openpgp | #

Wed, 04. May 2005
History Repeating

More than two years ago we release Ant 1.5.2 after a series of beta releases. It took about six hours before the first serious bug report came in and we knew we'd have to create Ant 1.5.3 - released just five weeks after 1.5.2.

Back then it made Conor write a blog entry about the value of beta testing and how it doesn't seem to happen anymore when your product matures.

Now we have Ant 1.6.3 (after four weeks of 1.6.3beta1) and it took fourteen hours between the announcement and the first serious bug report. <javah> is broken. Looks like a 1.6.4 release has to come soon.

Maybe we should stop making beta releases and simply call them final releases to get more testers.

path: /en/Apache/Ant | #

Tue, 03. May 2005
Bloglines Hates Me

At least since yesterday Bloglines claims my feed was invalid. Feedvalidator says "This is a valid RSS feed".

path: /en/personal/blogging | #

The Road To MSBuild

Mitch Denny has a little history lesson on MSBuild (via Jomo Fisher).

I certainly have to disagree with

Over the years, as Ant got more popular the beautiful target/depedency model got poluted by stinking proceduralists
I doubt that MSBuild is less procedural than a proper Ant build file, but that's just me.

The very idea of items in MSBuild - tasks, targets and even projects declaring their inputs and outputs, which would allow pipes of tasks or projects to depend of the outputs of other projects - still has a lot of appeal to me.

path: /en/dotNet/msbuild | #

Mon, 02. May 2005
Moving Things Around

Ant now has a place in Apache's Subversion repository and we are slowly starting to populate it. About six weeks ago we voted to have an Antlibs subproject in Ant and I've now moved the components that I want to turn into antlibs into the Subversion space.

If you are looking for the .NET (NUnit and NAnt, mainly) or Subversion tasks, the new location (for now) is here. At the same time the package names have changed. Since this is not yet carved into stone I've not created a new preview jar for the .NET tasks so far. The old "release" is supposed to work with Ant 1.6.3 just fine.

path: /en/Apache/Ant | #