and in other news...

I’ve aborted several attempts recently to get something of interest posted. For whatever reason, none of that stuck. So here’s something with fewer expectation attached to it: A collection of random updates.

Debian packaging

Spamassassin

The Spamassassin project released version 3.4.0, a major update over the 3.3.2 branch, after nearly two-and-a-half years in development. 3.4.0-1 is currently in unstable and testing, and seems to be working reasonably well for me. I’ve got another release in the works that will provide a systemd unit file (bug 716887) and also switch to using more appropriate mechanisms than ‘su’ for running cron-based maintenance tasks as the debian-spamd user.

Ipsec-tools

In response to Matt Grant’s call for help for ipsec-tools packaging, I’ve become an inaugural member of the pkg-ipsec-tools team and made a couple of uploads. The upstream release has been incremented from 0.8.0 to 0.8.2 to pick up some small bug fixes.

Cycling

With two races in the books, and another coming up in 2 weeks, the mountain biking season is in full swing. The first race (Stottlemeyer) was was a muddy mess of mechanical carnage, while the second (Echo Valley) was dusty, dry, and sunbaked. I dealt with mechanical issues throughout the first race, and that was reflected in my results. My results in Echo Valley were pretty comparable to last year. Overall time was slightly worse, but the winning times were higher as well. I suspect that this was due to the heat, which was really quite severe.

Two weeks from now is the Test of Metal in British Columbia, which is a really popular race and one of the high points of the summer’s race calendar. Last year was the first time I participated in this race, and I’ve been looking forward to this year’s edition ever since.

Parenthood!

Sarah & I are expecting our first child in early October. Thus far day to day life hasn’t changed a lot for me, but it certainly has for Sarah. Working in the garden, lifting things, and getting around by bike have all become pretty uncomfortable for her. Even sleeping has become a challenge because of difficulty getting comfortable. We’ve been brainstorming names, from serious to off-the-wall, but haven’t found anything worthy of going on any kind of short list. Any suggestions?

DNSSEC

I’ve enabled DNSSEC for several of my domain names, including this one. I had originally planned on putting together blog post (or series) about my experiences, but Martín Ferrari beat me to it with a couple of good posts. 1 2

I’ve found the Firefox DNSSEC Validator extension to be really interesting for visually identifying which of the web sites I visit regularly are signing their zones.

Conferences

I’m going to debconf and LISA! Are you?