Dear World,

ping is a very useful command. It lets me see if a host is up. If you block ICMP ECHO/REPLY then I instead have to play the "Guess what service might be listening" game. Or I assume your machine is down and might worry (because I care). So please don't do it. I really don't see what you're trying to gain; it strikes me as firewalling without actually thinking about it. Are you by chance ignoring things like destination unreachable as well? And breaking PMTU discovery? Well done you.

From an ubuntu-announce mail just received:

A slim default installation, occupying just 400 megabytes

Now I'm not picking on Ubuntu in particular here, but the word just really does seem to indicate that Tom Womack's proclamation that "Disk space is cheap" just continues to get truer and truer. My first well used Linux install was on a 40MB disk and I'm prepared to bet there are plenty of people who started with less. Even these days people like OpenWRT are producing distros that fit in 8MB of flash. I think it's a sad reflection that 400MB is considered a small footprint for a mainstream distro.

In the top hit for a Google on "Jonathan needs": Jonathan needs to start drinking more beer

Ages ago I got round to getting a smartcard reader and ordering a couple of OpenPGP smartcards from Kernel Concepts (who were very helpful and quite happy to deal in English via email). Unfortunately this all didn't arrive in time for the yearly Debian UK BBQ, so I missed getting a new key signed there. However, with the forthcoming Linux World Expo I thought I should get round to sorting out a new key. Much faffing later and I now have a key, 0xF4A8B30C, which has never been stored on a networked host (or indeed one with writable persistent storage). Though of course I'm doomed as soon as RSA is cracked, either by cunning maths or quantum computing. 0x5B430367 is still valid and I'll still be using it in general, but I'll probably expire my old PGP Type 3 key, 0x4DC4E7FD. I can't imagine anyone's tied to PGP 2 these days and there are flaws with the old key format AIUI.

So, anyway. Come to LinuxWorldExpo (I should be around the Debian stand for most of Thursday) and sign my new key. :)

In the continue theme of things software I've been using for a while can do, but I only just discovered, I give you editing of recordings under VDR. I use VDR as my PVR; taking a raw MPEG2 DVB stream and saving it without any conversion seems the right way to do things to me. And the interface may be simple, but that's good. However it's annoying to end up with lots of adverts on things I'm planning on keeping around; takes up unnecessary disk space for starters. So I finally put the effort into learning about setting cutting marks while watching playback. Hit 0, it makes a mark. Do it again, it makes another and decides the video between these two is what you want. Do this for all of the program and hit 2 and then it stitches all the bits you want together and ditches the rest. Result. You can even fine step the marks with 4 and 6. I've halved the amount of disk space my South Park collection is taking up. Result.