I'm getting thoroughly fed up with Debian's chkrootkit program, which keeps giving me false alarms.

( These reports are outrageous. I don't expect to receive cron mail like this. )

On one of the occasions described above I mentioned it to the nearest friend of mine, who was bjh21. I asked if he knew anything about chkrootkit, and he said not really but he ‘got the impression that it worked pretty well’. I can therefore only assume that in order for Ben to have got this impression, somewhere out there there must be at least some people who run chkrootkit without it doing this to them on a regular basis. I wonder who. And how.

And finally, it's difficult to report any of this as a Debian bug, because it's fundamentally about cooperation between two packages, so I'm uncertain of which package I should report any particular incident against. Given the sheer number of the wretched things, though, perhaps I should be leaning towards the idea that chkrootkit is fundamentally the cause of the trouble and report all bugs against that unless proven to be someone else's fault.

For the benefit of the (probably very few) readers who haven't heard me going on about this for weeks on end…

I've spent my spare time during the past two weeks mostly writing DVDs. When I upgraded my main home computer in January the new one came with a DVD writer at negligible extra cost. I hadn't bothered to equip my previous machine with one of these, on the grounds that it never seemed terribly important, but now I had one anyway it seemed like time to play with it. So I bought some blank DVDs (rewritable for testing, write-once for the final results) and started looking around for the software I needed.

( then I did stuff )

And now I've finished: I had a mental list of things I would have liked to do if only I knew how to write DVDs, and now I've found out how to write DVDs and done everything on the list. So now I can turn my attention to things that aren't 12cm across, round and shiny, and I can let all of that confusing terminology fall back out of my brain. I think that's a relief.