I recently read that the Free Software Foundation has given the Award for Projects of Social Benefit to the TOR Project. Congratulations! There are indeed some cases that the TOR network can be extremely useful to the societies. On the other hand, the fact that an organization like the FSF gives this award to the TOR project combined with statements like “People like you and your family use Tor to protect themselves, their children, and their dignity while using the Internet“, that can be found throughout the TOR project website, may lead the typical internet user into thinking that the TOR network, apart from providing anonymity, is also a secure way of communication, which is far from the truth. I don’t claim to be a network security expert or an authority on the TOR network, but I don’t think any expertise is required in order to state the obvious.
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It’s been a long time since I last checked the market for WLAN routers. Although I don’t intend buying one right now, I think staying up to date with the latest advancements in the technology used in these devices is a good idea, because I might need to buy one in the near future. And this time I want to make the right choice, which practically means I want to choose a wireless N router that is fully supported by the open source router firmware DD-WRT. For those not familiar with DD-WRT:
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Red Hat used to release its kernel SRPM package including a tarball of the vanilla kernel sources and a set of custom patches. This made it possible to rebuild the kernel with or without patches or with a custom selection of patches. It seems that things have changed and Red Hat now releases the Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel source already patched. This basically makes things less flexible for those who wish to apply a custom selection of Red Hat patches to the vanilla kernel source or build upon Red Hat’s patches and create derivative works.
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This post tries to investigate whether creating forks of software, that has been released under the terms of the Apache license, on Bitbucket or Github using a name identical to the name of the original project or a name that contains the name of the original project violates the Apache license or not.

Whenever I release code to the public, I license it under the terms of the Apache license version 2. I find this license to be very liberal, while at the same time it provides sensible terms about the use of copyright, patents, trademarks and names of the original work to those who are interested in building upon it. Below, there is an abstract of the license terms, paragraph 6:
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I feel that the long awaited CentOS 6 will be out soon. This is a very important release for all the things I am involved with and have to do with computers. CentOS 5 was perfect, but I had to maintain several custom builds of RPMs, mainly rebuilds of Fedora RPMs plus some private builds, and also several patches of Python applications which were not compatible with Python 2.4, which ships with CentOS 5. The 6th version of CentOS will eliminate the need to maintain so much custom software. I’ve already downloaded the RHEL 6 Server ISO image from Red Hat and checked it in Virtualbox. I am so satisfied with the quality and features of the 6.X series, that I seriously think I should stick with it for good, even after it reaches EOL. This is something I had been thinking about for the last months. Of course there are some things, like security, I want to examine thoroughly before going that way, but I will post more on this topic in a future post.

The other day I was experimenting with PostgreSQL under Windows and I was very confused setting a locale in the command line when initializing the database cluster. If I didn’t specify a locale in the --locale option of initdb, then the locale that was used was: Greek_Greece.1253. Well, I needed to initialize the cluster with en_US.UTF-8, but it would not be accepted. After some experimentation, I realized that no matter what name I tried, for example en_US.UTF-8, el_GR.UTF-8 etc, it did not work out! This led me to the conclusion that Windows uses different names than those I used in Linux for the same task.
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This post is a step-by-step tutorial on how to extend the expiration date of your GPG keys or reset it in case the keys have already expired. But, before we go through how to change the date, I’d like to write a few things about why setting an expiration date on your GPG keys is important.
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It has become common nowadays that Python projects provide their documentation in “source form“. The documentation is split into multiple files, written in restructured text, and is shipped together with some other configuration and media files for Sphinx. The user is meant to use the provided Makefile to export the documentation in various formats. This is good and useful. Sphinx generates some nice and very readable HTML files. The only problem I encountered today was that the provided Makefile or make.bat batch script (for Windows) cannot be used to generate a single file containing the whole documentation of the project. At first, it seemed that in order to print the whole documentation I should either:
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It was brought to my attention by a message in our forums that the download methods described in the “Use wget or curl to download from RapidShare Premium” article are no longer valid. Rapidshare has introduced a new API for account and file management. After a quick read of the Rapidshare API documentation, it was quite clear that the download methods that use regular cookies are not supported any more. I decided to spend some time with this API and try to write a Python script that can download files both as a free and a registered Pro user. I hereby publish this simple rapidshare client. I wrote this merely as an exercise and to compensate for the outdated information in that old article. I do not have a Rapidshare Pro account at this time and I’d say that I use such file-hosting services very rarely. So, the client has not been tested with a pro account. If you are a pro user, your feedback is welcome.

Update: Thanks to sharkic‘s feedback, this guide has now been improved by providing complete instructions on how to use wget and curl with the Rapidshare API. See the new sections at the end of the article.
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Although the full content of the posts is available in the website feed, until today I had been limiting the content (to just the post’s summary) that would be retrieved by UniversalFeedParser, which is the user agent string the PlanetPlanet software uses. This was done so that any buttons or ads do not appear in the Planet feeds. Unfortunately, several people perceived this action very differently, which led to some problems in the past. Recently, I realized that I am probably the only one who cares about such things, so, I announce that no filtering is performed on my side any more. Although the feed items do not contain any ads, social network buttons may be displayed. This change might lead to the re-appearance of my older posts in the Planet feeds. I apologize in advance for that (if it happens). This change is permanent, and I will work with the Planet administrators to resolve any potential future issues with my feed items.