Gio's Tilde

Having fun with signal handlers

Giovanni Mascellani — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 21:00:00 +0100

As every C and C++ programmer knows far too well, if you dereference a pointer that points outside of the space mapped on your process' memory, you get a segmentation fault and your programs crashes. As far as the language itself is concerned, you don't have a second chance and …

Bye bye Python 2!

Giovanni Mascellani — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 21:00:00 +0200

And so, today, while I was browsing updates for my Debian unstable laptop, I noticed that aptitude wouldn't automatically upgrade python2 and related packages (I don't know why, and at this point don't care). So I decided to dare: I removed the python2 package to see what the dependency solver …

DKIM for Debian Developers

Giovanni Mascellani — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 15:00:00 +0200

What is DKIM?

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), as Wikipedia puts it, "is an email authentication method designed to detect forged sender addresses in emails (email spoofing), a technique often used in phishing and email spam". More prosaically, one of the reasons email spam is so abundant is that, given a …

Debian init systems GR

Giovanni Mascellani — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 15:30:00 +0100

This is my vote:

-=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
7b77e0f2-4ff9-4adb-85e4-af249191f27a
[ 1 ] Choice 5: H: Support portability, without blocking progress
[ 2 ] Choice 4: D: Support non-systemd systems, without blocking progress
[ 3 ] Choice 7: G: Support portability and multiple implementations
[ 4 ] Choice 3: A: Support for multiple init systems is …

My take on OpenPGP best practices

Giovanni Mascellani — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 23:30:00 +0200

After having seen a few talks at DebConf on GnuPG and related things, I would like to document here how I currently manage my OpenPGP keys, in the hope they can be useful for other people or for discussion. This is not a tutorial, meaning that I do not give …

Bootstrappable Debian BoF

Giovanni Mascellani — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 02:30:00 +0200

Greetings from DebConf 19 in Curitiba! Just a quick reminder that I will run a Bootstrappable Debian BoF on Tuesday 23rd, at 13.30 Brasilia time (which is 16.30 UTC, if I am not mistaken). If you are curious about bootstrappability in Debian, why do we want it and …

DQIB, the Debian Quick Image Baker

Giovanni Mascellani — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 15:00:00 +0200

Debian supports (either officially or unofficially) a lot of architectures, which is of course a nice thing. Sometimes you want to play with some exotic architecture you are not familiar with, or you want to debug a problem with that architecture, but you do not have a computer implementing that …

Italy's liberation day

Giovanni Mascellani — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0200

Today is Italy's liberation day. On this day of year 1945 partisan insurrections in Milan and Turin freed those cities from the Nazi and Fascist occupation. It took a few more days to actually end the war, but that is the date that was later chosen as national holiday.

I …

Paris BSP and this blog

Giovanni Mascellani — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 11:00:00 +0200

Hello everybody!

I've never had a blog up to today, and apparently now I do. Why? Well, it happened that there was a Debian Bug Squashing Party in Paris a few weeks ago, and I thought that it might be nice to go, meet some nice people and humbly help …