jmtd → log → 2006 → 08

This weekend I was at Steve's House in Cambridge for the 2006 Debian BBQ. Many thanks to Steve for hosting a great party!

There was a spectacular turnout of people. It was nice to see people I've met at UKUUG conferences and such like, but also nice to meet some new people, including Europeans who had ventured over.

There are some of pictures from the weekend on flickr, but they're not very good because my camera was broken (more on that another time). There are some (much better) pictures linked at the bottom of this wiki page.

On a related note, I'm sad to see Matthew Garrett resign from Debian. He joins several others including Scott James Remnant (both of whom were at the BBQ) who have made the move to "full time" Ubuntu, having realised that Debian just wasn't fun for them anymore.

Tags: debian

Dylan McIntosh - or "Toke" as he named himself on doomworld, died in a car accident yesterday. He drove straight into another car. Luckily both the other driver and his own passenger have survived.

I'm now feeling angry and annoyed. I didn't speak to Toke much, and I don't remember actually liking him much either, but on learning the news I still got that familiar feeling in my stomach that I first felt in 1999 or so when Adam Emerson killed himself, when my friend Ollie killed himself this New Year, and more recently on learning of the death of my grandfather.

Looking at my archives, I don't seem to have written about when Adam died (I'm sure I did, but I mustn't have saved a copy of whatever site that was, 7 years ago). I certainly haven't plucked up the courage to write about my grandfather: Someone I barely know on the Internet dies and I can write something in 15 minutes, but about a month after the event and I still haven't put aside time to write about my grandad's death.

RIP, Dylan.

I've given up trying to read from my SATA disk in my desktop and instead invested in an external HD enclosure (bottom-right). It's the most cheap-looking piece of hardware I've ever seen. Getting the drive into it and reading from it ok was no easy feat and involved totally ignoring the screw-holes that were pre-drilled. I'm currently running fsck repeatedly, holding down the enter key for the Yes-prompts, and praying.

Here you can also see me preferring my X40's keyboard to my external one: It is much more comfortable. I'm still using the KVM for the monitor and mouse, though.

Some thoughts and initial observations about the FUSE-powered userspace Encrypted Filesystem, EncFS:

1. A filesystem created with encfs version 1.2.5 (the version in Debian unstable) can be read with 1.2.0 (the version in Debian stable)
2. You can't copy one of the encrypted files into a different encfs directory, even if the two directories were protected by the same passphrase. You need the .encfs5 file.
3. You can burn an encfs back-end directory onto a CD or DVD and decrypt the files later, but filename limitations imposed by the ISO format are made more severe by encfs (you definitely need joliet and/or rockridge extensions)

I AM NEVER DRINKING AGAIN