nutmeg's blog

balance sheet snowboarding season 2011/12

Andreas Metzler — 2012-04-21T12:06:28+00:00

Finally a year with real snow again.

Winter started rather late this year, I was still hiking at above 2000m end of November with zero snow there. First day of snowboarding was December 21st. Starting from there we never had too little snow. At home we topped out at 175cm, and had more than 125cm for a long time. Start of February was very cold, I had to skip a good day of good weather as I got a tiny bit of frostburn on my nose. (1200m of descent was a little to much at below -20°C.) A very warm end of March/start of April neverless quickly killed the snow here down at the bottom of the valley. There is still lots of snow in the mountains, although the ski-lifts have closed April 15th.

Judging from the number of snowboarding days the season was a bad one. It started late and ended early (31st of March). In spring I simply need good weather to have fun. - Cloudy nights are too warm, the slope does not freeze properly, which is perfect only for breaking one's leg.

Nevertheless if I could choose between a repetition of 2010/11 or 2011/2012, I would always go for the latter. :-)

On a sidenote, my local hill has switched from www.hoehenmeter.com to www.skiline.cc to provide statistical information.

Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25
Damüls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14
Warth/Schröcken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516

GnuTLS 3.0.x in unstable

Andreas Metzler — 2011-12-18T07:34:49+00:00

GnuTLS 3.0.x is finally available in unstable (and squeeze). Please consider upgrading. (Development package: libgnutls28-dev)

exim 4.77 rc4 in experimental

Andreas Metzler — 2011-10-08T12:31:06+00:00

exim 4.77 rc4 is available for testing in experimental. This release contains an incompatible change. Exim no longer performs string expansion on the second string of the match_* expansion conditions: "match_address", "match_domain", "match_ip" and "match_local_part". Named lists can still be used.

See explanation and rationale on exim-announce mailing list.

exim with support for TLS1.1 and TLS1.2

Andreas Metzler — 2011-09-24T16:56:11+00:00

I have just uploaded exim4 4.76-4 to experimental. Compared to 4.76-3 the only additions are the changes from upstream's gnutls_fixes branch, making exim4 advertise and use TLS1.1 or TLS1.2 if available.

We would appreciate some testing.

down

Andreas Metzler — 2011-08-01T17:11:25+00:00

This weekend I looked down.

pushing release goals

Andreas Metzler — 2011-06-19T12:19:36+00:00

Thanks to the bad weather I have made some progress implementing release-goal in my/our packages:

I have NMUed the last packages preventing me from dropping la files from gnutls and gcrypt. (Luk seems to have taken care of many others.)
Both libtasn1-3 and libksba are multi-arch aware now.

On a sidenote, please keep testing gnutls 2.12.7 (in experimental) to prevent unwanted surprises when we upload to unstable.

Hotfix for CVE-2011-1764

Andreas Metzler — 2011-05-09T18:00:26+00:00

Since exim is currently stuck in the perl 5.12 transition it is a very good idea to add "warn control = dkim_disable_verify" at the beginning of the rcpt acl on systems running testing. This will prevent attacks based on CVE-2011-1764.

balance sheet snowboarding season 2010/11

Andreas Metzler — 2011-04-16T11:31:52+00:00

This year we had very little snow again. Although winter started (too) early (first snow on October 16th) we topped out at little over 50cm in Au (in December). In a normal winter we should have 1m at least temporarily, and 2m is not a rare. Temperatures were high, too. I was usually wearing a layer less than normally. All this had me riding in Damüls most of time, Diedamskopf only saw me in December, since they have little artificial snow, and natural one was missing. Summer temperatures (20°C) at start of April cut the season very short. My last snow day was on April 3rd. On the upside I did not hurt myself this year (knock, knock) and the weather was good often.

Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30
Damüls	10	10	5	10	16	23
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4
Warth/Schröcken	0	3	0	4	1	3
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449

GnuTLS 2.12.0 in experimental

Andreas Metzler — 2011-03-27T17:53:35+00:00

I have uploaded GnuTLS 2.12.0 to experimental. Please test.

license incompatibilities

Andreas Metzler — 2011-02-20T13:14:34+00:00

GnuTLS has recently made Nettle its prefered crypto backend. I think Debian will need to continue to use libgcrypt for license reasons. While GnuTLS+libgcrypt and its dependencies are LGPL-2.1+ nettle itself is LGPL-2.1+, except for small GPL-2+ parts (serpent and blowfish). But these are being replaced by LGPL-2.1+ implementations currently. However nettle's public key library (libhogweed) uses and links against the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library which is LGPL-3+.

Afaiui this is a deal-breaker, GPL-2 (without the "any later version" clause) and (L)GPL-3 are incompatible. A nontrivial number of GnuTLS using applications and libraries are licensed (L)GPL-2. I started checking but stopped at "j" after finding cherokee-1.0.20, cluster-glue-1.0.7, cups-1.4.6, drizzle-2010.09.180, echoping-6.0.2, elinks-0.12~pre5, gtk-vnc-0.4.2, inspircd-1.1.22+dfsg and jd-2.8.1~beta110214.