ImperialViolet

OpenSSL (15 Sep 2002)

Power cut for about 10 hours today, grumble.

Aaron pointed out that IV's TLS/qmail was probably vulnerable to the OpenSSL bug. I could have sworn that Debian released a security advisory for this, but I couldn't find it and, sure enough, metis still had 0.9.6c. There still isn't a DSA for this, but unstable has 0.9.6g (as does metis now). Thanks Aaron.

Malaise

JDarcy:

My little corner of the blogosphere seems to have gotten a lot quieter lately. Obviously I've been updating less often than I used to, but many others - e.g. Zooko, AccordionGuy, even Wes Felter - seem to have gone through noticeably fallow periods of late. Whether the result is more or less visible output, everyone seems to be worried about whether they're getting enough (of whatever they want to do) done.

The latest person to catch this apparently-communicable disease is coderman. In his latest article, he laments the slow progress on personal projects, but finds hope in this observation:

I try to keep the posting frequency of IV at a reasonable level, but I do find that I'm not really reading or doing anything wonderfully worthwhile at the moment. In fact all this year I haven't really been coding anything significant. Mostly because I don't have any projects.

People say stuff gets done when programmers have an itch, and it's pretty much true. When I know what I'm doing I code like mad, but I find gumption traps all too common, mainly when something isn't quite right. (I have an unfortunate perfectionist streak). Lately all the itches have been far too big (I've bitched about this before) and I don't feel up to fighting them.

I sometimes think that I should work on Whiterose again since Oskar says that protocol is quite stable now. But then I look at the protocol doc and give up again.

Maybe things will change at Imperial.

(oh, Coderman is being told to spend more time with his wife via her blog )