Older blog entries for dyork (starting at number 378)

OCLUG GnuPG Lightning Talk Now Online - After the OCLUG talk last night, I put the presentation online on my site. Enjoy.

makefaq and PGP Signatures - Since I was talking about things you can do with PGP keys at last night's OCLUG meeting, I figured the least I could do was actually create some PGP signatures for my own packages. So I created detached signatures for each of the makefaq packages that I put out with release 2.4.

makefaq and Python 2.3 - After receiving a couple of reports that makefaq generated a warning about a deprecated character when run with python 2.3, I finally got around to trying it out myself last night. The error message was very helpful in that it provided the URL for the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that speaks of defining the source code encoding. It turns out that all I need to do is add a second line to the top of the file such as shown below:

#!/usr/bin/python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-

and my code will now run perfectly fine with python 2.3. The PEP gives more info about the rationale for this. So now it would seem that I need to roll a makefaq version 2.5 to incorporate this change.

OCLUG keysigning - Also had a mini-keysigning at the meeting last night. Wound up signing about five more keys.

Orkut - What the heck, I created a community there for DocBook users.

VoIP Snapshot - Interesting VoIP/SIP Industry Snapshot about the status of the current world of VoIP. Nice to see our logo in there with the other industry players (slide 6).

IBM Patents Developer Payment Method - I don't know yet quite what to make of this. It will be interesting to see what IBM says about it.

OSCON Call For Papers - O'Reilly has the call for papers for OSCON 2004 open until Feb 9th. Still deciding if I will submit a proposal. It's definitely a great conference.

Dave W rides again! - As we are both involved with LinTraining, whitinger let me know that he has started up a new Linux news site. I'll be curious to see how he'll differentiate his site from all the others.

2 Feb 2004 (updated 3 Feb 2004 at 01:22 UTC) »

VoIP Watch - Found a blog about VoIP that I should probably monitor from time to time. Some good links there.

And another one - Found out that Jeff Pulver has a blog. We have people that go to VON, a VoIP industry trade show that his group runs.

PGP Public Key Servers - While I have always used this page for a list of public key servers, I also found this page from David Ross which has a nice table listing various public key servers.

Rants Against Orkut - Interesting to see this criticism of orkut and links to many others. This piece at Headshift I found more thought-provoking than others with some interesting points about "social networking" sites in general. Other links I found interesting include: Many2Many, Conversations with Dina (toward the bottom), Marc Canter on being banned from Orkut, Marc Canter on 'gaming the system', anti-mega on the "fatal flaw of formalised social networking", "How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?". I am sure there will be even more posted in the days ahead as "Social Networking Sites" (SNS) seems to now be the topic of the day on the Internet... at least in the "Blogosphere".

I did enjoy the humor in this posting for a personal social assistant to manage all the person's social networking site subscriptions.

Blogs for Dean - Interesting piece by simonstl about technology and the Dean campaign.

Curling - dcoombs: Very cool that you are playing in the same speil as Guy Hemmings! Should be at least fun if you wind up playing him! He certainly makes the game entertaining.

Americana - Superbowl - We had to watch the Superbowl, of course. Not just because it is the quintessential "American" thing to do, but also because the New England Patriots were playing, and, well, yes, we'll admit to the ties to back where we grew up and lived.

All my life I was a "seasonal" football fan, in that I generally tuned in around the end of the season when the playoffs started. I used to be a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan (in the Terry Bradshaw heydey), but haven't really been a fan for years. Of course, living up here north of the U.S. border, we haven't really payed much attention at all to football given that there is so little interest.

Ah, but what a game yesterday! Even a hard-core anti-football person would have to put aside the fact that these guys are paid obscene amounts of money and just enjoy that second half. What a nailbiter to come down to the final kick in the final 5 seconds of the game. Truly an worthy championship game, and a heck of a lot of fun to watch.

Canadiana - Skating on the Canal - With a beautifully clear sky, strong sun and temperatures that were actually around -5 C, we had a wonderful afternoon skating on the Rideau Canal Skateway. Had a "Beavertail" for the first time since we moved up here 3 years ago (and enjoyed it)... and just had a fantastic time out with some neighbors.

Who Will Pay Off Bush's $1 Trillion Deficit? - Powerful stuff!

Ranting Aussies - Was surprised/amused to find a former colleague at Live Journal. He's a great guy and his LJ user name is just so completely appropriate.

A Lot Of The World Left To See - So of course I had to create my map using this site to create your own visited country map. A lot of places in the world still to go!

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.

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