It started this afternoon, a huge distributed dictionary spam attack. I'm seeing lots of computers trying to send email to random email addresses on my server:


postfix/smtpd[16754]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from host[x.x.x.x]: 450 4.1.1 warchief2005@....com: Recipient address rejected
postfix/smtpd[16997]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from host[x.x.x.x]: 450 4.1.1 Letitia-votera@....com: Recipient address rejected
postfix/smtpd[16754]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from host[x.x.x.x]: 450 4.1.1 waterzon1995@....com: Recipient address rejected


All of these mails (50.000 of them, despite adaptive firewalling) go to the same domain, so it must be coordinated somewhere. I'm using fail2ban, which keeps my system relatively stress-free (load still smaller than 0.5). To give a sense of scale: on average, there's around 60 hosts blocked by fail2ban. Bans last for 10 minutes, so that's quite a lot of hosts targeting my server.

Anyone seen similar stuff happening?

Somebody dropped into #f-spot on irc.gnome.org a few days ago and asked:

Fortunately, the answer is yes, F-Spot is very much alive and kicking. It's true, the pace was down for a period of time, mostly due to people getting precious time claimed by other obligations. Things are coming back up to speed lately and that's what this post is all about.

Build problems: resolved
F-Spot was quite hard to build for some time, due to a dependency on gtk-sharp from SVN. On top of that, this led to bugs for some users. Two weeks ago, sde came in and fixed it all.

Building F-Spot should now work on all modern distributions, without the need to install libraries from source. You can get it at git://git.gnome.org/f-spot.

F-Spot and Git: the power of DVCS in action
We've set up an automatically synchronized copy of the F-Spot git repository on gitorious.org. This allows external contributors to branch and publish their work, in such a way that we can track it. This has paid off, as you can see over here: http://gitorious.org/f-spot/. There's a buzz of activity with lots of cool branches being worked on. We love git, many thanks to the guys that made it happen, it's making our work so much nicer!

What's cooking
Here's a short rundown of what people are working on (remember, this is all very experimental and beta, no promises on it ever getting released):

• Mike Gemünde (tigger) is currently cleaning and refactoring quite a lot of IconView code. This will get our codebase into a much leaner shape, which will make future modifications much easier. He is also working on adding geotagging.
  
  
  
  Setting geodata (click for larger version)
• Paul Wellner Bou (piz) is working on a lot of stuff, including a nice extension that allows you to compare different image versions.
  
  
  
  Compare versions
• Lorenzo Milesi (maxxer) is taking care of bugzilla. Incidentaly, he also blogged about all this stuff. This is not coordinated, but it does nicely confirm the extra buzz I was talking about.
• Wojciech Dzierzanowski is working hard on Tabblo exporting to make it rock hard.
• And as for myself: I've been prototyping some stuff related to progressive image loading and preloading. I'm also looking into RAW processing for my GSoC. All of this is going at a rather slow pace as I'm in the final stages of writing my masters thesis.

Many hands make light work
It's true, F-Spot is far from perfect and we're all too aware of that. Also, there's so many cool features that we want in there, but haven't found time to build it yet. But we all want to build the nicest photo app there is.



And you can help with that! If you know how to program, join us on IRC and feel free to poke me. Many hands make light work and currently most of our hands are already overoccupied. We have plenty of feature requests already, so unless you want to program them yourselves, you'll probably just have to wait for it.

UPDATE: Due to me incorrectly parsing gitorious.org, I wrongly quoted Lorenzo as doing the Tabblo work. While he is helping to get it merged, it is Wojciech who deserves all the credit for the development, sorry for that!

Due to a mistake in their administration work Dell recently sent me a 6-cell battery for the mini 12. I cannot use this battery, as I own a mini 10 (and it really doesn't fit in that one). Fortunately, a quick phone call sorted things out and they sent me a new correct one. No need to send back the old one, that's not economic for Dell.

Therefore I'm offering it up for sale. If you are a free-software hacker who owns a Dell Mini 12 and you want a 6-cell battery: I'm offering mine, brand new and unused (I can't anyway), for the bargain price of around 80 euro. These batteries usually sell for around 120 euro / 150 USD, so you're getting about a third off (aint't that nice?). With this purchase, you'll also be sponsoring F/OSS development of a poor hacker, consider that the additional benefit.

The only problem will be how to get it: shipping these things costs quite a bundle, so unless there's some way of hand-delivery, it probably won't save you that much. I live in Belgium and I will be at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. If you are interested, contact me before Friday and I'll bring it along.