Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

According to this (German) spiegel.de article, thieves have stolen a hard drive from the recording studio of the quite popular German band Rosenstolz.

Among the contents of the drive are unreleased songs from the past six years and two songs which should be released on a new single in a few weeks. Apparently those two songs on the drive were the only instance they had, off-site backups only contained older "beta" versions of the songs. As the band is touring at the moment (i.e. no time for re-recording the songs), it's unclear whether the single can be released in time.

Lessons learned:

• Backups, backups, backups!
• Disk-encryption is not only for paranoid computer geeks, but also for normal people like you and me[1]. Really! If that hard drive would have been encrypted they would still suffer because of the lack of good backups, but at least their unreleased songs wouldn't have fallen in the hands of the thieves. I bet those songs will soon appear in P2P networks around the globe[2].

(via Fefe)

[1] Well, I am a paranoid computer geek, and I'm probably not a normal person, but you get the point ;-)
[2] Oh, and if the thieves are stupid enough they will get caught while uploading the files ;-)

The "I'm bored" release.

nice -n 19 find /usr/share/doc -name changelog.Debian.gz -exec zgrep "\* The .* [Rr]elease" {} \; | sort | uniq | bogosort -n | head -40


* The "Crack-smoking Squirrel" release.
* The "I should not have got out of bed yesterday" release
* The "Wohoo-we-are-going-to-main" release.
* The "And I thought IE had security bugs!" release.
* The "First snow in Finland" release.
* The "please buy me a brain" release
* The "I speak better English than this villian Bush" release.
* The "Brief Return From The Hell" release.
* The "Stoned Monkey" release.
* The "Let's do it cleaner" release.
* The "Fuck Me Harder" release.
* The "All or Nothing" release
* The "What's my name? Say my name, bitch!" release.
* The "next time I will buy myself a powerpc" release.
* The "I'm in such a hurry" release!
* The "I *hate* when that happens" release.
* The 'DOH!' release.
* The "laptop envy (damn tbm for having a nicer one than me)" release.
* The "Drunken Iceweasel" release.
* The "Follow the white rabbit" Release.
* The "someone should take my compiler away from me" release
* The "Ooops, I did it again" release
* The "Argh-I-took-the-wrong-version" release.
* The "Friday before Christmas" Release :-)
* The 'Yes, I need more sleep, and also to test my releases' release.
* The "you can't get sunburn at Finland" release.
* The "Chainsaw Psycho" release.
* The "Son of Drunken Iceweasel" release.
* The "Perl Sucks" release.
* The "I fucking hate libtool" release.
* The 'No, I don't use CVS' release.
* The "Throwing stuff away like mad and seeing if it still builds" release.
* The "This Space Intentionally Left Blank" Release
* The "From now on all of my world-killing weapons will be kept a TOTAL SECRET!" release.
* The "Lesbian Seagull" release.
* The "Oh my God, they killed Python, you bastards!" release.
* The "Evil Bitch Monster of Death" release.
* The "Pain as bright as steel" release.
* The "I've been hiding under a rock for two weeks" release.
* The "Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die..." release

I didn't bother to run it on the whole Debian archive on one of the Debian developer machines, as that would have probably pissed off some admins...

(via Jonathan Carter)

Update 2006-05-10: I have now created a list of "all" release strings in Debian unstable, which is available for download and further processing ;-)

I stumbled over this video (5.2 MB) today, while watching videoblogs in democracyplayer (for which I'm preparing a Debian package at this very moment).

The video seems to be a bit older, and I have no idea who the original author is or what license applies to it. Anyways, it's funny, scary and very very true at the same time. Watch it.

Google has hired Bram Moolenaar, author of vim.

I bet the next beta-service Google announces will be "Google Vim" ;-) Or maybe not...

(via digg.com)

Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, has written a book about HOW TO SURVIVE A ROBOT UPRISING.

Bruce Schneier asked for more suggestions, and he received. Plenty.

(via Bruce Schneier)