Steady as a rock

…or so they say

 

End of an era, beginning of another

Back in 2005, when Ubuntu was still young and #ubuntu small (less than 300 users), I became Ubuntu member and IRC operator. At the latest Ubuntu release the channel peaked at over 1600 and usually has more than 1200 users. It’s been fantastic to see this growth in #ubuntu and related channels.

In the past 3 years it’s been a fun ride from Ubuntu user/channel visitor in 2004, through IRC op, and then representative of Ubuntu on freenode. Earlier this year we have worked on a more formal IRC governance, resulting in an IRC council of which I have been a proud member.

But today that has all come to an end, I have resigned from the council and have placed the responsibility for Ubuntu’s presence on freenode in the caring hands of the other council members. The IRC community is a vital part of the community and is in good shape, it is time for me to do the same for my other big love inside the Ubuntu community: the dutch locoteam.

Founded in 2004, the dutch locoteam it is one of the oldest locoteams around and has seen a steady growth over the past years. We have many forum contributors and a good crew of active people, it is time to turn this enthousiastic group of people into a professional team of Ubuntu supporters.

We’re halfway there already, the active members all have great ideas on how to move forward and lots of progress has been made already. The best part so far of this is the AWESOME release party we had last saturday, we estimate the number of visitors at over 400!

On to 2008, the year of Ubuntu-NL!

Filed under : Ubuntu, Personal
By Dennis Kaarsemaker
On October 31, 2007
At 18:26
Comments : 5
 
 

Lwn becoming uwn?

Is it just me or is lwn slowly turning into “Ubuntu weekly news”? It looks likeĀ  all details of Ubuntu development are important enough to mention. I’m an Ubuntu fan and I like seeing Ubuntu getting press coverage, but this is ridiculous. This particular announcement is only important for developers, not for Ubuntu end users and completely irrelevant to the general public. I’d rather see some news about the upcoming fedora 8 (yay gimp 2.4) or what’s going on with opensolaris…

Filed under : Uncategorized
By Dennis Kaarsemaker
On October 26, 2007
At 14:53
Comments : 5
 
 

The ultimate password manager

I hate passwords. Thoroughly. I always forget them, so I tried several password managers but I don’t really like any of them. Revelation is the nicest so far, but it misses some flexibility. Ideally, a password manager would be just an editor that saves files encrypted, so I tried mped which seems to be able to do that. Not liking it, I hate using yet another editor. Wait… yet another editor…?

At that point I slapped myself in the head for overlooking the obvious solution for the ultimate password manager: vim. It is my editor of choice and can be scripted. 2 lines in ~/.vimrc and it’s the ultimate password editor, allowing you to encrypt everything with gpg easily. Only two passwords left to remember: user account and gpg key. Profit.

map <F12> <Esc>:%!gpg --encrypt --armor --recipient dennis@kaarsemaker.net<CR><CR><C-l>
map <S-F12> <Esc>:%!gpg --decrypt 2>/dev/null<CR><CR><C-l>

F12 now encrypts and Shifs+F12 decrypts. Yay!

Update: it can be done even nicer

Filed under : Personal
By Dennis Kaarsemaker
On October 24, 2007
At 10:04
Comments : 9
 
 

Hardy Heron changes feed

Seeing no changes coming in in my rss reader, I realized that I forgot to create a changes feed for Hardy. That negligence has now been corrected

You can find it at the usual place: http://media.ubuntu-nl.org/rss/hardy.xml

Filed under : Ubuntu
By Dennis Kaarsemaker
On October 21, 2007
At 20:03
Comments : 2