Deviant Abstraction

A national petition have been launched to hide them all.

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You need to see this.

This is what I call interactive art without the fuss going around it.

From Wired, I already blogged about the hacker who hacked top sensitive US sites to look for UFO. After releasing this information, now Wired is publishing an interview of him.

Truth? Fun? I do not know.

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Seen on Webmonkey. The idea seems good.

What do you think?

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This quite an interesting article. I have advocated for code reviews in my past companies. Sadly without success. This time I can at least say Google is doing it.

This is an article about code review from a Google developer, not from a Google point of view.

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This software from Voylent Software encrypts on the fly your phone conversation. It forbids anyone to overhear it or intercept it. There is the same issue for landline. Maybe they should port their software there too?

Question: their website do not specify the encryption algorithm used. Is it a strong one? Breakable? We know GSM conversation interception is really hard to achieve (because of frequency hopping) but really easy at the carrier center as landline. How strong is the encryption? Is it legal to use in France or anywhere else?

On a marketing side, if you use it, all your friends have to use it too if you want to have a secure talk.

One last issue: this software is political. GSM encryption is weak and phone interception is easy because of political and security issues. It is really a good idea. The old issue between security and privacy might be solved by the market. I am not sure it is the best solution for both sides.

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Via Boing Boing

Amazingly some books are only available on Amazon.com and not Amazon.fr. I had to create another wish-list…

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One my last Linux post since my laptop is nearly configured (only ACPI missing :(). To configure on Ubuntu your wifi network with WPA. I have tried a lot of different software and tutorials.

Actually, WiFi support in Ubuntu is far better than Windows. You just need to get the right software. Here is what to do:

• sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome
• sudo gedit /etc/networks/interfaces — Comment out everything but “lo” entries in that file
• Reboot your system
• Left-click the network manager icon in Gnome and select your wireless network
• Follow the prompts for password, type, etc.

I will probably stop here the geeky post series.

Via this blog (I deleted a few steps from his guide).

Here is a must read on the Rise and Fall of Corba. Some great lessons on how not to create a useful and used standard. Computer history is still rare so this article is interesting.

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I hope this quick post would save another a few hours. I was not so lucky. I spend a few hours working on how to migrate my calendar and addressbook from Outlook to Evolution. I didn’t yet migrate my mail (for this you need to install Mozilla and then export the files. Evolution knows how to import Mozilla files).

To migrate your calendar and addressbook, you need Outport. Outport offers a way to migrate your data (except emails) to Evolution format. This works fine for the addressbook but not for the calendar.

To migrate your calendar, what you need to do is simply export it as iCalendar (ics) with Outport. It will create one file per entry in your calendar. Then you aggregate them all into one big file. For this: cat *.ics >> myCalendar.ics. Finally, you import this file using Evolution importer.