Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

SELFHTML is a very popular German (X)HTML reference and tutorial which also covers CSS, JavaScript and related technologies.
Today, I have updated the SELFHTML Debian package to the new upstream version 8.1 (I'm the Debian maintainer of the SELFHTML package).
It's probably too late for the upcoming sarge release, but at least the package is now available for those who use unstable (and testing, soon).

The Debian Project Leader Election 2005 Results have been published today. The new Debian project leader (DPL) is Branden Robinson, congratulations!

A total of 504 developers voted, which is 52.227% of all possible votes.

(First post!!!1 Erm, I mean... I posted this even before it appears on Slashdot)

Update: Both, Symlink (German) and Slashdot have the story now.

I tried out the nice bfbtester tool (Brute Force Binary Tester) today, which performs checks of single and multiple argument command line overflows as well as environment variable overflows and thus helps in finding possibly insecure software (and fixing it, of course).

A few minutes ago, I stumbled upon a very similar post by Nico Golde, who blogged about bfbtester today, too.

I'll probably post a slightly longer article eventually, listing some more tools for checking and auditing software (either black-box style using bfbtester or similar tools, or white-box style, i.e. tools which scan the source code of the software being tested, like rats, flawfinder, pscan etc.).

The Debian Security Audit Project (which I have joined recently in order to help a bit with auditing Debian packages) has some more information about a few Security Auditing Tools.

Seems like I'm a bit fanatic about maps lately... Here's a world map of where the Debian developers live:

It's generated from anonymized location data of the developers using the xplanet package.

Joey Hess, a fellow Debian developer, keeps his life in subversion:

For the past five years, I've checked every file I've created and worked on, every email I've sent or received, and every config file I've tweaked into revision control.

He has done this for an even longer time using CVS (see his other article "CVS homedir") and explains the advantages of using SVN over CVS. He successfully converted his CVS repositories to SVN and they now amount to several gigabytes of content.

I'm quite impressed with this, and - having already used SVN for several code projects - decided to use it for my homedir now, too. Today, I checked in my .bashrc, .bash_logout, .bash_profile, .procmailrc, .muttrc, .slrnrc, .xsession, .vimrc, .signature and a few other files into SVN, more will follow later.

Also, quite important for me, my local .todo file (currently a 130 KB plain-text file with more or less important TODO items) is now in SVN. I imagine I'll have a lot of fun when I browse the history of my .todo file in a few years ;-)

One thing I already have in SVN for quite some time is my websites. Before uploading any file (via FTP, scp, whatever) I check it in on my local computer. As most of my sites are database-driven (using wikis or CMSes), I also periodically get the database dumps and check them into SVN.
This provides me with the additional benefit, that I can test any changes to my websites on my local computer, before they become public. If I mess up, I can always restart with a simple rm -rf foo && svn up foo.

For the future I plan to also put my /etc directory as well as the /etc of my server(s) into version control.