Even little differences count

If you ever find yourself relying for any reason on the behaviour of Microsoft Excel, make sure you never ever change its version. Seems like I had some problems with my job because the version of Microsoft Excel I bought is not the same as the one they are using at the office.

Also, if you want to shut up Valgrind’s warnings to make life easier for people developing against a given library, it’s time you hear about suppression files, rather than trying to change code you don’t know enough about.

Seems like a little difference in the patches applied by Debian (and Ubuntu) made OpenSSL vulnerable like it never was. Even my keys has to be considered compromised, so I had to change them on every service I use. This means Alioth, Gentoo’s Infra, GentooExperimental, SourceForge, Berlios, Savannah, Rubyforge, Launchpad (don’t ask), KDE, and of course my own server.

I think yesterday will be remembered for the years to come as a critical day. It’s like a city of the size of Milan starting to change the door locks for all the apartments at once. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more confusion.

Myself, I’m starting to consider some other kind of authentication, as the passphrases I use for the keys are quite long, and I’m tired of having to key it in every time I start the system. SmartCard and authentication tokens start to look quite nice, and it would be a nice test for Gentoo’s PAM infrastructure.

It’s unfortunate that Alon, who as far as I remembered managed these things, left Gentoo yesterday :/ Although I suppose that if I am to start looking into these things I might be able to lend a hand.

At the moment, I’m oriented toward an authentication token, as that would make it possible for me to have it around on the laptop too at any time. Strangely enough, I found an Italian producer, Eutronsec, and their CryptoIdentity token seems to be supported by pcsclite.

SmartCards are more likely useful in an organisation where you’d have one reader on a given system and many many cards around. Here I’d just have one reader and one smartcard if I did go that way. If the Italian ID card was a SmartCard I could have chosen that, but at the moment it doesn’t look like a convenient idea.

Unfortunately it seems like Eutronsec only sells to other companies, I’ve mailed them asking if they could sell to single entities, but I haven’t received an answer yet. I’m afraid I’ll have to start looking for alternatives if I want to proceed on this road.

On a totally different topic, but still related to “little differences”, I’m having difficulties finding cups that I can use with my espresso machine. Usual teacups that my family uses for coffee (yeah they are quite larger for coffee, we’re used to those though, a six servings Moka is good for three here) tend to be too thin at the bottom and large at the top, so the coffee spills a lot, especially when doing a hot boiling espresso. Mugs are quite better for the task, but all the ones I have here are little less than 9.5 centimetres (little more than three and a half inches), and require to be skewed to enter the espresso machine.

The idea would be an 8.5cm cup, but I can’t seem to find them in the shops around here, they are either 6 centimetres, which is way too short, or they are the “usual” mug size. In a Chinese shop around here I found some nice cups that are about 12cm actually, I was tempted to take one to hold the milk for cappuccino, actually, but they are quite too high for the espresso machine.