Software archeology - New Nagios SNMP Plugins release
A long, long, long time ago, I used to moonlight (well, actually daylight) as BoFH and during that time, I wrote two small plugins for Nagios. Five years later, this code is still in use and included in a number of mainstream Linux distributions.
And it still has an annoying compilation bug with gcc4. One that I know of since almost three years.
Today, one of these vendors actually forwarded me a patch they are using in their RPM. Cool. Time to cut a new release.
Get Nagios SNMP Plugins 1.1 while they are still hot. Have fun.
archeology c code GPL open sourceWhat do you mean, elected?
Some of you might have heard about it or seen it on jimjag’s blog: Yes, it is true. I have been elected to the board of the Apache Software Foundation.
I still feel thrilled, scared, stumped and excited at the same time. I will try to pay back this credit of trust during my board term.
apache open sourceHorray! Drag and Drop on Linux!
2007 is definitely a good year, if the product with the longest development cycles ever finally has an official major release.
And now I can finally drag a file out of the IDE into the one true editor!
Imagine that! Working drag and drop between two major applications on Linux! In 2007! (Only ~ 10 years after another operating system got it right)
Why is it that things that one is so used to on every other mainstream OS are sort of a revolution on the Linux desktop?
desktop eclipse emacs linux open sourcePGPSigner
Sometimes I go to PGP Key Signing parties, often at some conference that I attend. While the key signing party itself is fun, there is a boring (and error prone) part of key signing that I much too often neglect: The actual signing of the keys.
You end up with a piece of paper saying who was present, which keys should be signed and then… you postpone it to another day. I found a list of keys to sign from an event eight months gone. Which sucks.
So in the true spirit of Steven Pembertons keynote at ApacheCon EU 2007 (”let the computer do the work”), I searched an application for this. There are some shell scripts out there that seem to do the job for some people but most of the times, if you ask “how do you sign your keys”, the answer is either “manually” or “I have a self rolled script” (I omitted the third possible answer “I never get around to do it”).
I am a Java Weenie. I hacked a small Java application that lets me do all the steps of reviewing a party key file, signing the keys and mailing them out (also uploading to key servers) from an interactive command line. With command completion, help and all the stuff that one expects in the 21st century.
I met the various usual Java perils (e.g. One-Jar chokes on signed jars, which are needed for JCE or strong crypto under Java needs the Unlimited Strength Policy files installed) but in the end, here is PGPSigner which allowed me to sign the party key lists from the last eight months in about ten minutes (And it was fun to test some stuff I always wanted to check out like PGP key handling in Java).
Get it from here, if you are interested. Open Source, Apache licensed. Feedback welcome.
java open source pgp