Older blog entries for dyork (starting at number 376)

1 Feb 2004 (updated 1 Feb 2004 at 00:52 UTC) »

Open Source Telephony Summit - dsandras: Thanks for writing about the Open Source Telephony Summit. Interesting to know about it. I look forward to learning more about what occurred there.

Synchronicity, Social Networking Sites... and orkut - ncm: I, too, was invited to orkut and similar to what you wrote, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It was interesting to see the number of people that I did know there.

In a weird bit of synchronicity, on my bus ride home on the day before I received the invite to orkut, I read an InfoWorld opinion column by Chad Dickerson about social networking sites, specifically Linkedin. I actually had never heard of such sites before. It's interesting. I don't know quite what to think yet. I know I will write more about them in the future.

"Ten Risks of PKI: What You're not Being Told about Public Key Infrastructure" - Interesting article by Carl Ellison and Bruce Schneier. Good things to think about.

You Never Know Who Will Turn Up - So I look at my article to see the comments and lo and behold willy has posted... I never knew he had an account here! (And there seems to be a complete lack of diary entries! :-) He's been around OCLUGand GnuPG keysignings and I've met him through that. Pleased to see him here, although obviously he's been here for a bit.

SCO to Congress: Linux is the enemy - Is SCO really this stupid? Watch the last gasps of a dying entity...

N.H. Politics - Amusing to find out that a close friend of mine was on the front page of the Christian Science Monitor in a random shot of former Vermont Gov. Dean "talking to voters". My friend is the guy with the goatee and hat. He was out doing errands, saw Dean there, and stopped to ask him about his position on education issues. Ahhh, the presidential primary in N.H..... you gotta love it... for a political junkie like me it is just an amazing place to be every four years.

Article on fun things you can do with your PGP/GnuPG key - So I finally got around to posting an article on the topic of fun things you can do with your PGP/GnuPG key beyond the usual signing/encrypting of files and e-mail. I will be very interested to see what response are posted.

H.323 security advisory - A good bit of time about a week ago (sheesh, it's been a bit since I've written!) was consumed by the widely reported H.323 vulnerability. I was able to get a statement posted there about our (Mitel Networks) lack of vulnerabilities (with one exception still under investigation). Still working on getting such a statement posted at CERT as that is being much more of an involved process to get set up with CERT.

MIMAIL/MyDoom/Novarg - And how many virus alerts did you receive today? Our anti-virus software caught the messages, of course, but our inboxes filled up with "A virus has been detected...", etc.

Not a fun day to be in a corporate IT department...

MacOS X articles - If you haven't seen it, Tony Lawrence's collection of MacOS X essays makes for a fun read. He has an entertaining style along with good technical info. I enjoyed the one about why his wife hates his Mac. Fun stuff.

Ice Palace movie - forrest: Very cool! Thanks for sharing it.

RSS Aggregator for Windows? - All of the recent discussion about RSS made me interested in checking it out again, but unfortunately my desktop is Windows. Any opinions about what is the best RSS aggegator for that other operating system? (Thanks)

GnuPG/PGP - Recursively Retrieving Keys - One of the small annoyances with GnuPG, or any of the PGP variants I have so far seen, is that there does not seem to be an easy way to recursively retrieve keys from the public key servers.

Now, why would you want to do this? Primarily because if you import someone's key and do a "gpg --list-sigs" with their keyid, you see the names of people you already have in your keyring who happen to have signed this person's key - and a whole bunch of key ids that are really meaningless. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes you just wish you could pull into your keyring all the keys for someone whose key you have.

It's like 'gpg' needs to have a "-r 1" to recurse 1 level and pull down those keys. (If you just left it open you might wind up pulling down the whole web of trust and tens of thousands of keys later......) A colleague found that he could do it this way (where the 'x's are for the key id):

gpg --list-sigs xxxxxxxx | cut -b 13-20 | xargs gpg --recv-keys

but that's not overly fun. It would be nice if there was some simpler way. (And yes, I could write it, but I don't even remotely have the time to think about that let alone write a patch that could do it.)

WoT stats - Amazingly, although I haven't attended any keysignings for quite a while, I'm still 536 on the top 1000. Pretty wild, given that most of that comes from going to the OLS keysigning last year, as well as a OCLUG keysigning.

PGP for Panther - Interesting column about the PGP Freeware 8.0.3 version for MacOS 10.3. As the comment suggests, there is also GPGMail that works with Apple's Mail program and GnuPG. Still, interesting to see the review of PGP freeware for the Mac.

Green Vehicles - jdhildeb: Thank you for the link to the EPA's Green Vehicle Guide. Good stuff. Glad to see that Subaru's wagons rate highly, at least for 2004. (Our 1996 Subaru wagon, I am sure, no longer rates that highly.)

Children - Congratulations, chalst! May she bring as much joy to your lives as our wee one has to ours!

21 Jan 2004 (updated 21 Jan 2004 at 01:29 UTC) »

LPI considering Level 3 exams on Security and Samba - With LPI having completed work on LPIC Level 1 and Level 2, they are now starting the evaluation of what to do for Level 3. This news item explains how you can become involved. This is only the first phase of the development of the exams and these two exams (Security and Samba) might never be developed. They are possible exams. The research now needs to be done to validate that they are right to do. More info in the news article.

Notes CLI - Interesting to find that Notes has a CLI. Not sure exactly what could be done with this, but it's nice to know it's there. As soon as there is a CLI, you can script things...

DHS gets an F - I love the fact that the Department of Homeland Security gets an "F" in information security.Good thing they are protecting us... :-(

SSL VPNs - Interesting long article about SSL VPNs as an alternative to IPSEC and PPTP.

LPI's translation project - For German readers, Heise Online has this article, about LPI's translation project called T7e (SourceForge page found here).

GPGshell - Found out about GPGshell today, which appears to offer similar functions to WinPT. I'll have to investigate...

IM emerges from the shadows - At least, according to this ITworld.com article.

LiveJournal - salmoni: Funny about the common theme usage... in the few minutes I played with it, that particular theme was the only one I liked. But, as I said, I didn't really play with it much.

python 2.3 universal newline support - follower: Thanks for the pointer to the universal newline support in python 2.3. As someone who works with text files in python on multiple platforms, it's definitely interesting to see.

bluefish - Intriguing.

Subpixel rendering - haruspex: Interesting about MacOS 10.3... I was about to ask how to enable it when I realized that: a) my wife's iMac only has 10.2; and b) it's a CRT. Ah, well... we'll just have to wait to purchase one of those nice large LCD displays that I drool over everytime I go to a Mac store. :-)

NSA Security Guidelines for XP - Interesting set of guidelines from the US National Security Agency about how to secure Windows XP

Cold Snap - There is cold, and then there is COLD... it has been quite warm here in the capital of Canada... in fact, it was raining just the other day, and the vaunted Rideau Canal has not yet frozen over for outdoor skating...

But that all has changed today... tonight it is expected to be -27 or -29 C (which, for those in the US is around -16 to -20 F) and what's worse is that the windchill is expected to be between -35 and -40 C!

For those who are not aware, -40 C is roughly the same as -40 F!

In whatever scale you choose... all you can say is that it is dang cold!

5 Jan 2004 (updated 5 Jan 2004 at 23:30 UTC) »

Leaving Advogato - or not - chalst: Thanks for the kind words... and no worries... I'm far too tied to Advogato to completely leave it. As I said in my last message, way too many people know that can find me here.

Now, what I may do is post some of my non-technical ramblings over at LiveJournal... maybe some poetry... then again, maybe not. I don't honestly know. Still thinking about it... we'll see.

Best and worst of Messaging and Collaboration in 2003 - On Dave Sifry's (formerly sifry, now here) weblog, I found a link to this interesting essay on the author's pick of the best and worst items in 2003 in the areas of messaging and collaboration. Interesting picks.

Annoying uses of Flash on a website - My January 2004 pick for most annoying use of Macromedia Flash on a website has to be this site for Ottawa Winterlude, mostly because the bear just keeps on throwing the snowball... it should do it once, maybe twice... but not infinitely... and then it seems you can't use the "back" button to get away from the page. Very annoying.

Microsoft ClearType - I am extremely rarely blown away by technology. Undoubtedly that comes from 25+ years working with computers and having worked with all sorts of different technologies. I'm generally cynical and jaded when it comes to new things... I'm always looking for new and exciting things, but generally ready to be disappointed and extremely cynical that they will live up to their hype.

Today, however, I am indeed impressed. When reading an online newsletter I receive, there was this text written by Mark Minasi:

If you're using Windows XP on an LCD display, you've probably already discovered one of the best reasons to have an LCD instead of a CRT--Microsoft's ClearType display technology. (And if you're one of the many who haven't enabled ClearType, right-click your Desktop, choose Properties, click the Appearance tab, then click the Effects button. In the resulting dialog box, choose ClearType under the "Use the following method..." label. Using ClearType technology is like discovering a focus knob for your display.)

I enabled it... and was almost immediately blown away by the instant change in clarity. VERY impressive! I've been using XP for probably close to a year now, but never knew this feature was in it. (Some of my tech friends reacted with "Duh! That was one of the big things about XP." Okay, so I never really read the XP marketing hype...)

Being someone who worked with and taught electronic publishing for many years (specifically FrameMaker and later DocBook), fonts have always been an area of interest... it's very cool to see what MS has done.

In an e-mail exchange with Mark today, he pointed me to Steve Gibson's page on ClearType where I found this page an especially useful introduction. (Thanks, Mark!)

GnuPG for spam - forrest: I, too, have wondered about the use of GPG for controlling spam. However, there are some basic issues about the lack of good GPG clients for mainstream e-mail clients. At work we use Lotus Notes, at home I use IMP, my wife uses Apple's MacOS 10.2 "Mail" program... and most of my relatives are on AOL. Now, yes there are ways to use GPG keys with all of those, but they are not necessarily easy. For instance, I use WinPT to allow me to GPG-sign text on the clipboard before pasting into a Notes compose window... not exactly something that I'm going to expect my mother or father to be able to do.

For GPG-signing to work, it needs to be simple for the end-user to use... ideally even transparent so that everything just gets signed on the way out. Yes, mutt and many other Linux and open source mail programs can do that today... but until such capabilities are available for mainstream e-mail clients, I don't see anything really working.

LiveJournal and posting via PGP/GPG - Was interested to see that among the features listed at LiveJournal for their paid accounts was the ability to post entries via PGP-signed e-mail. Given that I'm always interested in new uses for PGP, I just found this cool to see.

gpg --refresh-keys - Oops.. I guess I haven't refreshed my keyring for a while. Across my keyring of 204 keys, a --refresh-keys added 1284 new signatures.

LPI Milestones - LPI has some pretty amazing news to announce about the number of people LPI-certified... but I won't steal their thunder... except to say "Stay Tuned" for news out of LPI. It will come soon.

Pretty darn amazing for a Linux community project that started out from nothing...

linux.conf.au - mrd: The conference definitely looks to be a great one... congrats to you and all the team there for lining up what looks to be such a great event!

Psi 0.9.1 - LenZ helpfully pointed out to me that Psi 0.9.1 is now available for download. It actually came out back in early December.

I guess we WILL go on that diet! - Woke up Sunday morning to find water on our kitchen floor, draining out from the freezer compartment of the refridgerator... looks like it is the compressor (and our fridge is only 3 years old!), which is still under warranty... but can then only be fixed by Sears... who didn't have any technicians on call on Sunday (their "24x7" support turns out to only be for phone support!)... and so we have to wait until today...

But much of our food had gone bad in the meantime, and so we wound up cleaning out the whole fridge... we had been talking about changing around the foods we were eating to be a bit more healthy... looks like we now have no excuse.

[Update: Post-technician-visit - it appears we are one of the very few people who lose their compressor each year. Of course, since we brought our refridgerator from the U.S., they have to order a compressor from there... and so it looks like maybe by Friday we may actually have a working fridge!]

Babylon 5 DVDs - Finally broke down and ordered Season Three and pre-ordered Season Four (it is released tomorrow!) on DVD. The series is just way too good NOT to buy them.... the extras are nice, but mostly I just enjoy being able to watch all the episodes in sequential order, and without commercial breaks. Looking forward to it...

To LJ or not to LJ - So I've had this running debate in my head about whether to continue my writing here at Advogato or to do what others (most recently salmoni) have done in writing about technical issues here and writing about personal issues over at LiveJournal.

It's a tough decision. I've been writing here since May 2000, and the XML file for my diary clocks in around 1.2 megabytes of text... many friends and relatives know that they can check here to see what I have been up to (which results in occasional fun msgs from people with whom I haven't had contact in years). Yes, this site doesn't have some of the fancier features that LJ and other "blogging" sites have (like comments on diary entries, polls, images, etc.), but it has been my home on the web for my musings, writings, rantings, etc., for now 3.5+ years.

And yet.... as I find my time for free/open source software continuing to diminish... and as I am no longer involved with LPI, LI, the LDP or with larger efforts within the Linux community... and where I'm not working with DocBook as much....... well..... I find my entries swinging toward more and more personal issues and other interests. So would it perhaps be truer to the purpose of Advogato for me to take my personal ramblings elsewhere?

I don't know... just to have the URL, I did go ahead and create a dyork account at LiveJournal. Perhaps I'll use it. Perhaps not. Perhaps I'll post my poetry and other completely off-topic (for Advogato) text over there. Perhaps not. I just don't know.

The Return to Work - Tomorrow I return to work for the first time since December 23rd. In all honesty, I have to say I greet the day with a tinge of melancholy. It's not that I don't like working there. In fact, I'm happier now about where things are and where they are going than I probably have been in 8 or 9 months! I'm psyched about the new org structure and am looking forward very much to working with my new manager. I think I will learn a great amount. It's more that I've gotten darned used to just waking up in the morning and thinking about what things I will do that day with Chloe and Lori. Spending time with the two of them is quite addicting... and I don't really want to give that up... it would be nice to have another week (or two) off with them! Ah, well...

LinTraining - Approved a new entry to LinTraining in the United Arab Emirates.

makefaq deb package - Took a long-needed moment to go through old e-mail in my personal account and found that Michael Wiedmann had sent me a Debian package for makefaq back in March 2003! And while he put it up on his site back then, I have yet to put it up on my site. Oops.... I sent him an apology this morning and hope to get it up there later today.

makefaq 2.5 in 2004? - Given that I essentially did nothing at all on makefaq in 2003 and given that I released 2.4 back in November 2002, I wonder if I'll actually get a chance to put out another release this year. I don't really have much to add to it, but I received a short e-mail from someone saying that the current version (2.4) throws up a warning when used with python 2.3. It still works, but just has a warning. So I'll check into it... and perhaps that will give me a reason to do an update.

Curling - As the results show, we won last week. Tomorrow night we play at 9pm, always tough for me since we don't finish until 11ish, and then with socializing it's usually close to midnight by the time I get home... tough to do when you then have 8am meetings the next day. Thankfully I don't have an 8am meeting this Tuesday.

31 Dec 2003 (updated 31 Dec 2003 at 01:50 UTC) »

[Mostly a travelogue for a recent trip into the USA...]

Transitions - The transition of our unsupported developer release from our developer site to contribs.org continues to go quite well. The folks at contribs.org have picked up the bulletin boards and the developer mailing list is almost ready to go. It's great to see how well it is going.

LinTraining - Approved new training center submissions to LinTraining from:

  • Ramonville - Toulouse, France
  • Scottsdale, Arizona, USA

The Porous Border, part 395 - With the "Orange Alert" in the U.S., there was more security at the U.S. border on this trip. For the first time in ages, they asked us to stop and a U.S. Customs inspector came out and inspected our "torpedo" (the Yakima "RocketBox" luggage carrier we have on top of our Subaru). He just looked in with his flashlight briefly, while apologizing all the time. (Chloe was also crying at that time.)

Of course, no one asked us where we were going, what our status was in Canada, whether we were bringing in gifts (we, of course, were!) or any other questions... nor did they look at any of our passports.

LotR:RotK - In what has been a three-year tradition, my brother-in-law and I went to see the latest LotR movie. Others have said much on the topic, so I feel no need to add much more. All I will say is that I thoroughly enjoyed it (even at 3 hours and 20 minutes!). Very well done movie!

Two Different Worlds - Received a Christmas letter from one of my best friends (and my best man at our wedding) that was just a glimpse into an alternative world. He and his wife are living out in rural Minnesota in a small (I think one-room!) house they built... that is currently without running water and with a composting toilet. They are home-schooling their two daughters, running their own farm, butchering chickens and just otherwise living extremely close to the earth.

Whereas we live in a city of 700,000+ people in a house that is really larger than we need and where I could not even remotely tell you where our food comes from. Two completely different worlds!

Books to learn to play guitar - Went to Borders in Concord, NH, looking for a book to help to learn to play guitar... was overwhelmed by the sheer number of basic books. Think I will wait until I can potentially take a class in January and find out what book(s) the instructor recommends. If any readers have suggestions of books that worked for you, please do e-mail me with them. (Thanks!)

BLAME CANADA! - After Christmas the newspapers in New Hampshire were filled with headlines about the U.S. cow with mad cow disease being traced to Canada. Big headlines above the fold... lots of editorials. Of course, subsequent articles did point out that it was a preliminary finding and that DNA tests due back in a week or so would verify that.... but by that point everyone already had it in their head that it was those darn Canadians again! And then, of course, you have Canadian rebuttals urging restraint until the origin has been confirmed. Ah, cross-border fun...

The Porous Border, part 396 - The return into Canada involved the following exchange with a Canadian Customs officer at the border:

Officer: Where do you live?
Me: Ottawa
Officer: Canadian citizens?
Me: No, American.
Officer: What is your status in Canada?
Me: Permanent residents
Officer: How long were you in the US?
Me: 6 days
Officer: Did you receive any gifts while there?
Me: Yes... we are guessing around $xxx Canadian.
Officer: Any alcohol? tobacco? firearms?
Me: No
Officer: Are you bringing in any groceries? Any meat?
Me: No
Officer: Okay. Have a good day.

As per usual, we were NOT asked for our passports (or permanent resident cards). We were amused at the question about meat - we had never been asked that before... one must assume it has to do with the aforementioned beef issue.

The Chloe Journals - Every day brings new vignettes... like today when we gave her a new set of kid-size dishes for her play kitchen and she took out the tea kettle and started to "pour" into cups... or when she saw me getting ready to leave the house and went over to where her boots were saying "boot!" repeatedly until I got her boots out to bring her with me. ;-) Each day just brings new moments of joy.

Random thoughts and comments...

Advo-Kruft, part 2 - So, someone actually reads this thing, eh? I got a note that I had missed mperry from the list of people I knew at Linuxcare who have Advogato logs (I've now updated that list). Of course, the esteemed Mr. Perry hasn't updated his diary for quite a while... :-)

The watch continues - aftyde: Interesting update on the man... thanks.

LinTraining - Approved two new training centers at LinTraining:

  • Malaysia
  • Alberta, Canada

RIAA drives encryption - Interesting article in Security Pipeline about how, in the author's opinion, the RIAA's enforcement efforts against music piracy are actually doing more to encourage the use of encryption than all of our (privacy advocates) efforts have done. Interesting thought.

Two different paradigms - When a developer with our product was being introduced to a developer of a Windows-based application within our company, the Windows developer had a question:

Q: So, what kind of IDE do you guys use?
A: vi!

I had a good chuckle. Yes, when your GUI is entirely in HTML and all your code is in perl, there isn't really a whole lot of need for the IDE that you would have in a Windows environment. Two different worlds.

ISSA - Attended a meeting of the Ottawa Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association. Interesting group of people there. The talk was alright, although it was much more theoretical that I typically care for... I'm not sure that I really gained a whole lot out of it... but I did meet some very interesting folks... it was great to connect with other people who work with IT security issues on an ongoing basis. I may actually join the organization (this meeting was part of testing the waters).

PGPfone - Was pointed today to PHPfone as a tool for secure communication across the Internet. However, it looks like pretty much all the info about it is very dated at this point... and there does not appear to be any activity on it anywhere. Interesting idea, though.

Skype - Article at news.com about Skype's VoIP Ambitions. I do admit to being intrigued by Skype, although not enough, of course, to actually install and use it (I have downloaded it, though!). Still, it's an intriguiding idea. It will be very interesting to see how it evolves.

Code Review - hacker: Though ardous, I am sure that the many of us out here who do use certain projects of yours will be very pleased to have the additional support and stability stemming from your code review. Thanks for caring enough to go back and do it.

Departures - Goodbye, vivekv... I did enjoy reading your postings when you were regularly doing them. I hope your new blog works better for you.

I've seen a few other folks depart Advogato recently (rml is one just today) for other websites that offer more capabilities (or in rml's case make more sense since it is hosted by his company). It's true that other "blogging" sites offer more capabilities... the ability to receive comments... polls... better offline features... all of which is interesting, but at the end of the day, I guess I'm just too lazy to consider other sites... Advo has worked well for me now for most of 3.5 years.

So I'll probably be here until raph winds up pulling the plug on the servers. ("Last one out the door please turn off the lights...")

OSCON Call for Papers - I see that O'Reilly has the call for papers online. I haven't been to OSCON since the first year... it might be time to go back... hmmm...

And then there were three... - The house has been a lot quieter lately. Ever since the greyhound we were dogsitting bit Chloe on the face back in July, we had been more cautious with our own greyhound, Atticus (even though he had nothing to do with the actual incident). After several months of agonizing about what would be most fair for him and us, we finally wound up finding a new home about a week ago for him with a family that had four greyhounds but had recently lost one. It was an extremely painful and difficult decision, as he had been part of our family for over 6.5 years. However, I talked to the new owner last night and she said he was doing extremely well and was playing with the other three dogs. I'm so thrilled that he has companions to be with... and that he is doing well. He was a wonderful member of our family for so long.

The Chloe Journals - As far as the other newer member of our family, she continues to be the amazing little 20-month-old that she is... each day brings new and incredible things that she can do! She actually had her theatrical debut on Sunday.... a walk-on role as a "sheep" in our church's Christmas pageant. She was very cute!

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