Planet Ubuntu-Au

• Using Twitter stats to find where the bogans live. I wish they did this for Australia. http://t.co/WSKhvRuEtn 10:36:40, 2013-05-17
• 26 Everyday Occurrences In Australia http://t.co/gm6prXPJA1 via @buzzfeed 20:28:23, 2013-05-16
• 2300 year old Mayan pyramid demolished for road fill http://t.co/C7DPc4H8sR 15:17:59, 2013-05-16
• Using context to compare govt budgets http://t.co/pehPWWljar 09:03:20, 2013-05-16
• Strangely, this all seemed so normal back when I was a child. http://t.co/aNm3cmV2Ef 22:17:24, 2013-05-15
• Stupid mistakes every start-up owner makes http://t.co/YX9XsGysJL 21:32:59, 2013-05-15
• Microsoft reads your Skype Chat messages http://t.co/sVeVhFDwCy 09:48:44, 2013-05-15
• Space Oddity, recorded by an astronaut on the International Space Station! http://t.co/SDZfxWAvC7 via @youtube 16:45:46, 2013-05-14

Last time I blogged I spoke about the current stoush occuring in my Federal seat of Throsby between the left and right factions of the Labor party over who was going to be the next Labor candidate (and most likely member).

Well, the final showdown is going to happen on the 15th of June, with the current encumbent Stephen Jones going up against the contender and son of a former state mp, John Rumble.

Now sticking with Throsby politics, I've been thinking about doing something podcasty for the local election. The basic plan is sit down with every candidate and spend 20 - 30 minutes getting to know them, their personal motivations for running, how the policies they're running with will help Throsby etc, etc.

What do you think?

In 2013 a generic spam email can get 14,000 clicks apparently.

The email:

You can get the stats by simply adding + to the end of any bit.ly url (https://bitly.com/penisxxl+)

disappointing.

Tonight i was working on getting a client's Zimbra SSL configuration up to scratch, and found it somewhat difficult to get our server to make Qualys' SSL Labs scanner happy.  I was working from the following Zimbra wiki pages:

• http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Weak_Cipher_Suites_Appear_in_Security_Scans
• http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Postfix_PCI_Compliance_in_ZCS
• http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Cipher_suites

It seems that as of Zimbra 8 (possibly before that?) there is no longer any need to configure jetty - everything seems to go through nginx as an SSL reverse proxy.I tried several different combinations and still kept getting insecure ciphers in the Qualys scan results until i stumbled across this nginx forum post and these certificate installation instructions.  Between them i managed to glean that:

• !aNULL is necessary to disable unauthenticated ciphers like TLS_DH_anon_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA and TLS_ECDH_anon_WITH_RC4_128_SHA (the latter is particularly infrequent in Google's search results).
• !eNULL is necessary to disable null encryption
• RC4 needs to be preferred over the other HIGH ciphers in order to mitigate the Beast attack (more at Qualys' page about it - although note their update about the status of RC4)

So the commands i ended up with for Zimbra were:zmprov modifyConfig zimbraReverseProxySSLCiphers '!ADH:!eNULL:!aNULL:!DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:!SSLv2:!MD5:RC4:HIGH'zmmailboxdctl restartThis was enough to get us an "A" rating in Qualys' eyes.

Using Twitter stats to find where the bogans live. I wish they did this for Australia. venturebeat.com/2013/05/14/twi…

26 Everyday Occurrences In Australia buzzfeed.com/awesomer/total… via @BuzzFeed

2300 year old Mayan pyramid demolished for road fill abc.net.au/news/2013–05-1…

Using context to compare govt budgets abc.net.au/news/2013–05-0…

Strangely, this all seemed so normal back when I was a child. is.gd/H9OJnc

Stupid mistakes every start-up owner makes is.gd/Mqoy9e

Microsoft reads your Skype Chat messages is.gd/LpEwXI

The (second virtual) Ubuntu Developer Summit is being held this week. Of the many topics being discussed, I’ve come across a few that I find interesting.

Chromium as default browser

Great to see a session on this topic. I spend most of my time computing in a browser, so it’d be nice to see my favourite browser as the default. Although I have no objections to Firefox as the default, I usually download the .deb from Google on each install, mainly due to the chromium-browser package being fairly outdated. It will be interesting to see the outcome for 13.10 and 14.04 LTS.

Growing a strong translation community

I still find translations to be a core concept of the Ubuntu. No matter where you’re from, you should be able to download a copy of Ubuntu, ready in your native language.

Planning for documentation and positioning of the development release

The last cycle entailed a barrage of fireworks and cracking decisions. The standard release support cycle was halved and more effort was to be put to backporting important features and enhancements to the LTS. Although the development release, by nature, doesn’t directly affect end users, it is the test bed for what will become ubuntu+1. The quality of the development releases have been superb and I’d argue that they are much more ready for testing than where we were a few years ago.

Shaping a plan for the future of (the) Ubuntu Documentation Team

There’s a lot of computer users out there that still haven’t even tried Ubuntu. We have a more usable, sleek and fun desktop than what we did many moons ago, but the documentation of the Ubuntu Desktop is certainly an area that needs attention. We can’t just assume people know how to use the Dash, Scopes and find help. People come and go from the team and it’s time to reshape and recruit more Ubuntu Doc folks.

Desktop Unity Polish for 13.10

In most of the releases since Unity has been released (11.04!), there have been radical changes and controversial moves to the Ubuntu Desktop. It’s nice to see everything calming down and focus shifting to the little details. Probably not a thrilling session for the non-developers, but it would be nice to see what is coming up in Unity+1.

Space Oddity, recorded by an astronaut on the International Space Station! youtu.be/KaOC9danxNo via @YouTube

zxcvbn: realistic password strength estimation
https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/04/zxcvbn-realistic-password-strength-estimation/

The tool:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/209/zxcvbn/test/index.html

Another website (with added fancy CSS and colours!)

http://howsecureismypassword.net/

Typical boring Intel Password checker:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security/passwordwin.html

Everybody knows correcthorsebatterystaple, Ironically(?) I’d hazard a guess to say that correcthorsebatterystaple has most been used so frequently recently that there’s a decent chance it has been added to a dictionary and can be brute forced.

The federal seat that I live in - Throsby - is by all accounts a very safe Labor seat. Since it was created in 1984 it has been held by Labor. The current encumbent, former union secretary Stephen Jones retained the seat at the last election with 62% of the vote after preferrences were distributed. If the expected votergeddon happens in September Throsby will be on of the few seats that Labor retains.

Which of course means that it is a treasure to be made safe against the on coming tide of voter dissent.

Or it means that it's a valuable prize in the ongoing battle between the Labor Left and Right factions.

Which do you think has happened?

Let me give you a clue. It's just on four months until polling day and the Liberal Party, National Party and the Greens have each selected their candidates for the seat. The Liberals have Larissa Mallinson, the Greens have Shellharbour Councillor Peter Moran and the Nationals have decided to field Gary "Angry" Anderson. (note no links to the others because I can't actually find any pages for them)

The Labor party?

They've only just decided whether they're going to have a rank and file vote or not.

Last friday Labor announced that the Throsby candidate would be decided by a vote between the incumbent (and left faction warrior) Stephen Jones and nurse (and right faction battler) John Rumble. No word as to when this vote is meant to occure but it had better happen soon, because frankly, if they leave it any later, they're gong to miss the election.

The infighting in Throsby has been going on for years. with member for Wollongong Noreen Hay leading the charge from the right. As with all family arguments things started nasty and have only gotten worse. Any article published by the local paper is immediately flooded with angry comments from both sides, with the occasional liberal or greens supporter deseperately trying to get a word in edge wise.

So where does that leave us, the voters in Throsby? Well, I've spoken to a number of people and frankly they are jack of the infighting. Watching the local Labor party tear itself apart isn't exactly confidence building, especially considering how Federal Labor is viewed in general. 

Who ever wins the pre-selection, they're gong to have a hell of a battle, not just against the other candidates, but the fall out from the internecine warfare that's consumed the local branches for the past few years.

Well it's been a busy week work wise and Angry Beanie wise, over all I'm pretty happy with how things are going.

I'm currently working on making some changes to the Angry Beanie site. I've already added the three latest episodes as blocks on the front page featuring HTML5 players, but I'm also looking at rebuilding the Show and Episode pages. I'm just not happy with the layouts, too busy and not exactly attractive to look at.

Aside from actually putting together the content, I have two focii for Angry Beanie. Getting more people to listen and putting together a fund raising plan that will allow me to expand what AB can do. 

On the getting more people to listen side of things, I've been playing around with how I promote each episode on twitter. I've noticed that if I include a direct link to the audio file I get a lot more downloads than if I just link to the show page. Some of those downloads seem to be bots, but a lot seem to be legitimate listeners.

On the other hand, and this has to be me doing it wrong, Facebook and Google+ just don't seem to be doing it for me. I have 23 likers for the Angry Beanie facebook page and 29 circlers of the Angry Beanie google+ page (along with 81 +1's) but I'm not really getting any interaction. I tend to suck as a community building guy I guess :)

That's it for the moment, never fear, there will be more political and technical posts coming. It's not just going to be all Angry Beanie all the time :)

The Do’s and Don’ts of Picking Technology for Schools is.gd/BzkPPD

How learning to code helps to learn important life skills edsurge.com/n/2013–05-08-l…

This is more of a rambling thought flow that anything with a particular focus.

Firstly, I need to post here more often. I've gotten out of the habit of actually sitting down and putting my thoughts to paper (as it were). Mostly because I've tried to keep away from stuff that could be called recreationally enragening.

However over the past few weeks I've come to the conclusion that at times, it's actually perfectly valid to be pissed off about something that you see/hear in the media. Not over things like Tony Abbotts "women of a certain calibre" comment, honestly if I was going to get pissed off every time Abbott said something stupid then I'd have a heart attack before I was 36.

Instead it's things like the fact that the Government wants to strip away the already meager welfare provisions for for asylum seekers who have the temerity to appeal an adverse decision. Or the fact that our "progressive" Government is being made to look reactionary and right wing by the New Zealand conservative government.

Or its watching the "ER MER GERD ABC IS BIERSED!" crap that flies around. Both those who call themselves the left and those who call themselves the right claim the ABC is biased against them. 

"There are no conservative presenters on the ABC" is the cry from the right

"Why even is the IPA!" is the cry from the left.

Of course this all boiled up after the last time that Leigh Sales interviewed Tony Abbott. Because Sales didn't eviscerate Abbott and leave his bloody carcass on the floor for the forest wolves, people accused her of being the lapdog of the right (and that by no means was the worst of what she was accused of being or doing).

If you didn't like the interview, then fine, I personally thought that Abbott had been better trained for it, being able to keep repeating the same thing over again regardless of what question he was going to be asked. 

What was really incredibly galling was the stench of hypocrisy  (those in the know will recognise the phrase) over some of those who claimed to be on the left. Especially those who would take the opportunity to slam Abbott for being mysogynistic and then go on and being even bigger mysogynistic fuck knuckles by accusing Leigh Sales of orally servicing Abbott in no uncertain terms.

You don't get to do that. If you do that you lose, there is no winning and you just look like the monster browed idiot that you are.

Sigh.

As I said, this post was always going to be more a rambling thought thingy than anything else. I really do need to get back into practice.

Hence my unplanned optimism when I announced that LIUM 0.5 would be done by the end of last year.

I don’t know what it is that makes custom signals so complicated but it’s currently 5am and I’ve just done yet another sprint at trying to understand it, and I gather it’ll be a few more nights until I do.