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If you’re going to FOSDEM this weekend and I know you, drop me an e-mail or text or whatever and we’ll arrange to meet up! A printable schedule of the weekend has been released.

Following Alan’s recent blog post I decided to pull my finger out and do what I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and write a parody of the “Three men on class” sketch from the Frost Report but for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I’ve mirrored the structure of the original sketch very closely and now present my first public draft in PDF format (3.2KB). It is a work in progress and I’d love constructive comments.

It would be cool to get some people together and film it, too.

Laura got me this just for putting up with her:

Makes it all seem worthwhile now! Coincidentally, the first of the four photos I took of it was named CRW_1963.CRW by the camera.

I’ve finally had some success with my OpenPGP card. I gave up trying to use it (and the two card readers I own) under Ubuntu Dapper. I said I would wait until Ubuntu Edgy was released and I did so, but was in no hurry to give it a go because it was such a frustrating experience last time around. The version of GnuPG shipped with Edgy seems to have the driver for the Cardman 4040 in it, which meant that running “gpg –card-status” worked. Well, sort of. It wouldn’t be totally straight-forward, would it? It only worked as root. Running as a normal user returned a pcscd related error. Given that the GnuPG internal driver for the Cardman 4040 doesn’t use pcscd this was a bit puzzling. Then I worked out that GnuPG was simply failing to access the device node so falling back to trying a pcscd interface. Then failing there too.

I worked out that the device node used for the Cardman 4040 is /dev/cmx0, which was read and writeable only by root. Thanks to tip in this blog post, I was able to configure udev to assign the device node some more appropriate permissions. Then it worked as me! The Smartcard management utility in Thunderbird even worked without any further fiddling. I’ve still not tried it using my USB card reader, which I think will be more of a battle.

I followed the HOWTO to set my card up with subkeys of my existing GPG key. Well, I started to. I could set my name on the card and set my gender (phew!) but gnupg segfaults when generating the signature key. (The preceeding authentication key is generated succesfully.)

So, progress. But not much. I’ll be waiting for Feisty then.

I’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1 which was released about a fortnight ago. I like it so far, although all the visible changes are to the admin parts of the site which only I get to see! The upgrade was very smooth and only required one change to the template I’m using, which was due to a bug in previous versions being fixed. There are a number of changes in the new release, although the most noticable part is how much faster the admin interface renders and the ease of switching between the visual and code based editors. I had to Ctrl+F5 to force Firefox to dump the cached version of the visual editor as it had lost some icons in the upgrade. After that, it was just fine.

This year’s LUG Radio Live has been confirmed as taking place on the 7th and 8th July at the Lighthouse in Wolverhampton. No further details are available yet, so keep listening to the show and checking the website or forums for more information. But I’m looking forward to it all ready, it should be great fun.