There's no Place Like ::1

Today I give a talk at my university about data protection using cryptographic techniques in Linux. It was a good talk, there was around 30 people in the room.

The talk was recorded entirely so I plan to have a digital copy of me very soon :) I will post the slides on another post, as soon as they are uploaded to a stable server.

*: Slides PDF here. Enjoy! *[UPDATE 2]: The slides moved to another server. Get your copy here. Have fun :-)

Remember I told about this course?

I’ve heard that there is simple hardware emulators for Linux so you can design your own device driver, implement, test and learn without using real hardware! Do you know were I can find it?

Today I discovered Yahoo Pipes after reading this post. A friend of mine told me the service is already one year old. It seems I’m a little bit distracted.

First, I have to say this: IMHO, this wins the “best web service of the year” award, and by a large margin! Google has some serious competition with this kind of services…

So on this post I decided to give a brief introduction to this Yahoo service and demonstrate how easily you can build a dynamic feed aggregator using Yahoo Pipes!

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A long time ago I stopped using Fedora Core Linux. Although it was a rock solid distribution, I missed the “there is a package for everything” that Debian based distributions offered me.

This week I am working with a buddy that installed the latest Fedora Core 8 on his laptop. Three days have passed and he is still compiling packages manually :-) So it seems that nothing as changed. Any contrary opinion?

For instance, AFAIK Fedora has the biggest pre-packaged Perl CPAN module tree. However, I still have to install Catalyst and DBIx::Class manually (yes, Debian based distros do it right!). Ruby-DBI is still a PITA to install on Fedora, but it’s naturally available on Debian based distros, including the patch for SQLite3 support!

Oh and BTW, 64 bits Desktops still sucks…

Today a friend of mine sent me this link. It is a full blown introduction course on Linux Device Drivers programming.

I’ve tried a lot of times to learn how to program the Linux Kernel, not to do some actual driver, but to better understand how it works (and maybe someday send real patches and contribute to a better free world :-)). I have red half of the O’Reilly’s Linux Device Drivers, but gave up lacking motivation.

Now this course gives a little more motivation: first I like the slides format, secondly his work is centered towards building a real drive for a real hardware device! That sounds great! Can’t wait to read the slides.

The slides currently in Portuguese only, but it seems that the English version is expected soon.