It's been a while since I've been on Advogato. There's not a whole lot of new stuff going on in my life. I'm still working as a sysadmin. As I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot more interested in making money and a bit less interested in free software. So, most of what free time I've been able to find recently has been spent on commercial projects and stock/options trading software. Work at my day job has been super busy. But, it's finally starting to kinda slow down now.

I just released a new version of passgen. Mostly it was because some of the users I support have been having trouble with homoglyphs. This release adds the ability to suppress homoglyphs and force either upper or lower case.

I've been learning a lot about image processing, vision, and AI, for a project I'm working on. I've been spending most of my time working on code that uses openCV. I want to give the openCV people big props - amazing job guys it's one of the cleanest, clearest, and most robust libraries I've ever used. It's saved me *so much* time and effort.

I've finally released a new version of the PGP Keysigning Party HOWTO.

I've also now gotten the vast majority of things properly redundant and mostly automated at work. So, I'm finding myself with much more time for such things.

I've started a new vertical blog on cryptography, called CryptoWatch, and started back-populating it. There's just under 50 entries now. There's obviously tons and tons of other stuff that I need to back load. But, I keep getting busier and busier with other stuff. So, I'm letting people know it's there now in case I don't get back to it for a while. I am keeping an eye on all the crypto related journals, blogs, mailing lists, etc... as I had been before I started CryptoWatch. I will post anything note worthy that passes in my periphery.

CryptoWatch is basically meant to highlight the announcement of technological and mathematical advancements that may impact decisions about the use of cryptographic systems. I hope that it will be a great way to stay informed about bleeding edge advancements in fields that effect cryptosystem, algorithm, key length, and expiration date choices. I'll also try to help keep you keep abreast of the state of emerging disruptive technologies like quantum computation.

If you decide to become a reader, I hope that you enjoy it.

Current mood: working
Current music: none
Entry tags: web2.0, timeline, mit, jewelkilcher, simile, xml

Web 2.0 Goodness

One of the groups I work for, The Simile Group, released a javascript program for visualizing temporal data. It's called Timeline. It allows you to plot XML data on a graphic and then to click and scroll that graphic (like Google Maps).

I made a Timeline biography of Jewel Kilcher to give me some idea of how it works. She just released a new album called "Goodbye Alice in Wonderland", which I thought was excellent. She's touring to support it now, and I'm going to go see her later this month at Mohegan Sun. She's got a Country album comming out next year too, that I can't wait to hear. Anyway, here's what it looks like:

<center>

(click a thumb nail to access the running program) </center>

I have a list of patches I want to write for the program. One itch is that it doesn't do a good job with layout when events are non-concurrent but share start and end days. Another is that it doesn't support the idea of events happening as part of a larger event in concurrence with events that are not part of that larger event with out significant screen real estate consumption. You really need 700px's in height to see my Timeline and use it easily, already. We'll see if I can find the time for the patches. Overall, it's a cool app though. The API is well developed and makes good use of the OO paradigm.

It would be worth while to play with. It would have been nice to see on CNN.com during Sept. 11, for example. The documentation and source code are available from the Timeline page on Simile's Website.

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