Tuesday, July 5, 2005

Codex Review


I wrote a review for Slashdot on the book Codex. It was a mixed review on a mediocre book, so I guess I shouldn't be disappointed in the mixed and mediocre response from the Slashdot crowd.

Slashdot sent me a bunch of books to review after I did one a while back on The Haskell School of Expression. I hope the rest of them are more interesting.  

APT Secure


I was very pleased to read that "apt-secure" will finally make it into Debian. It's been about a year and a half since the apt-secure work that Colin and I did was merged back into APT mainline and released as 0.6.

Folks might be interested to find our page on apt-secure which is perhaps unknown to someone who created a new page on apt-secure with no-doubt updated information. Am I the only one who thinks that APT could use a web page? I'm very glad that the apt-secure test suite is hosted with darcs!

While we were working on this, I promised myself that I would buy a laptop computer when it was done. Fortunitely, I decided that "done" meant feature-complete, not delivered with Debian... I won't tell you how old my laptop is, but it'll probably be replaced before apt-secure gets delivered with a stable version of Debian ;)

I keep trying to get involved in APT development, but I find it pretty hard to follow the mailing list. A few months ago, there was a request for help, which I replied to a few weeks later, after I dug myself out of some other work, but my response was ignored :( I'd still be interested in being involved in the ongoing discussions about apt-secure or testing of apt-secure, or even other apt-related development since I'm pretty familiar with the codebase.

Perhaps I'll take a look at the tasks on the above-mentioned web site and try again to get involved.
Peace,

Isaac