Prices on SSDs are coming down and performance is going up. It may not be time to be buying yet, but that time may be sooner than people think.

• 64GB SSD on the Desktop: Samsung and OCZ go mainstream
• Memoright SSDs: The End of Hard Drives?

I’ve always chosen Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging over Pidgin-Encryption. I appreciate that OTR is compatible with multiple IM clients, not just Pidgin, and offers perfect forward secrecy. Both products are packaged in Debian and Ubuntu as pidgin-otr and pidgin-encryption and once installed will show up in Pidgin’s plugin list.

I recently tried the reniced package only to find that it isn’t a daemon at all as is indicated by its name ending in “d”. It’s too bad because if it was it could be useful. It could always be called frequently from cron in order to have a system that continuously adjusts the niceness of running processes. The config file is pretty nice as it’s just a list of a nice level pair with a regular expression to match against the list of processes. This can be useful to change the niceness of processes launched without any other mechanism for controlling the nice level. I found that running firefox and kvm with a niceness of 10 can keep either from making the rest of the system too unresponsive.

I've been evaluating both Gnash and Swfdec for a few weeks. I've come to the conclusion that Swfdec is the superior software. Far more Flash content works with Swfdec than Gnash. However, Swfdec still hsa the same problem it had under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon): it uses a full processor core when displaying Flash video. I spend some time today trying to track down the problem but was unsuccessful. It has been noted that the problem only seems to occur when using Swfdec through a browser such as Firefox or Epiphany. When I was looking at process cpu utilization I noticed that sometimes the browser would be consuming the CPU but other times it would be X using a large number of cycles. That, combined with the fact that not everyone seems to suffer from this issue, leads me to think there is a configuration issue responsible. However, no amount of changing the X configuration on my system made any difference. Still, video is usually still watchable using Swfdec though it does stutter a bit. And Swfdec's compatibility with other Flash content is much higher than Gnash. I would certainly recommend Swfdec over Gnash or Adobe's Flash player for Ubuntu 8.04.

I haven't written about this issue yet but felt I should say something as it took most of my last week in resolving. I've read a lot about people dealing with this problem and yet very few seem to truly understand the implications. The bottom line as far as I'm concerned is that all Debian and Ubuntu systems built with the vulnerable package should be considered compromised. And that means a lot more work is needed to secure the systems than just regenerating ssh keys and ssl certificates. Now, I realize that rebuilding all machines might be too much work for many sysadmins. My plan is to rebuild all my host machines and simply consider my virtualized guests to be compromised. Whether that is a wise idea remains to be seen. At a minimum people should not only update all of their keys and certificates but also reset all passwords on the system. At that point one can just hope that no one compromised their machines during the extended period of vulnerability.