Seahorse Release

Seahorse has just made a release, so go out and grab it! Here's a link to the release announcement. Get the source here.

I've also been working on adding functionality for photo ID's. At the moment, getting the photo id works. :-D Diff, screen shot, and ghetto image at the bottom.

I'll be having my own release party with free beer from my advisor later! Woooo!

Mucho Goodness

Monday was the first day on the water. 2x20 min pieces with novice coxswains for all of the varsity crews. It worked out pretty well. Our first morning practice of the semester was Tuesday. Unfortunately the lake was horribly fogged in. We did 1 min on 30 s off x 10. I was very happy with how that went for me and the other lightweights. Today is a recovery day.

I attended the Clemson Career Fair today. I talked to BAE Systems, MIT Lincoln Labs, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Divison, and Harris Corporation. The first three went really well. The rep from Harris offered me an interview for tomorrow, but it doesn't sound like their corporate goals match up with mine. They didn't seem to be interested in talking now about interning later at all. The guy from LL is giving my resume to their summer jobs coordinator. I need to check out more positions at NSWC-DD and BAE. I'm still hoping Dr. Butler comes through with money for the summer.

Yesterday, I got in touch with discountmugs.com about the status of the pint glasses. They said there were flaws with the first batch and the new estimated ship date is this Thursday.

Water, Water, Everywhere

After two and a half months of erging, tomorrow Clemson Crew takes to the water. The shift to water practices brings with it a decrease from intensity level(IL) 4 to IL 2, as well as the start of morning practices as of Tuesday.

I hope my back has recovered enough.

Oarsman Brewing Company

The latest batch of beer from the Oarsman Brewing Company has successfully been bottled! It's a strong dark Brown Ale that tastes pretty good. Start the three week count down till the big sampling.

As a side note, even with drinking two bottles yesterday, I was a bottle short of 48 today. I really need to get my empties back from people I gifted beer to.

This is the first batch I've made solo from start to finish. After bottling by myself, I'm looking forward to kegging. Too bad I'll have to move off campus before I can build a kegerator with Cornelius style kegs.

This guy's is really cool. I like his quick disconnect modifications to the standard kegerator design. The hose barbs on most sites look like they would be a real pain in the patoot.

If you want to be my brother's Valentine go here. He has a really nice set of parting gifts for the winner.

Attack Against OpenPGP Encryption

An interesting post to the GnuPG Announce list by David Shaw

From: David Shaw
To: gnupg-announce at gnupg dot org

Last night, Serge Mister and Robert Zuccherato published a paper
reporting on an attack against OpenPGP symmetric encryption.

This attack, while very significant from a cryptographic point of
view, is not generally effective in the real world. To be specific,
unless you have your OpenPGP program set up as part of an automated
system to accept encrypted messages, decrypt them, and then provide a
response to the submitter, then this does not affect you at all.

There is a very good writeup on the attack that goes into more depth
at http://www.pgp.com/library/ctocorner/openpgp.html

There will undoubtedly be further discussion of this over the next
several days, but I wanted to provide a few comments now, to try and
answer some questions that may arise:

1) This is not a bug in any particular OpenPGP implementation (GnuPG,
PGP, Hushmail, etc). Rather, this is an attack against the OpenPGP
protocol itself.

2) The attack requires an average of 32,768 probes to get two bytes of
plaintext. This is why it is completely ineffective against
human beings, who will presumably wonder why a stranger wants them
to decrypt thousands and thousands of messages that won't decrypt,
and then tell them what errors were seen.

3) It might be effective against an automated process that
incorporates OpenPGP decryption, if that process returns errors
back to the sender.

4) The OpenPGP Working Group will be discussing this issue and coming
up with an effective and permanent fix. In the meantime, I have
attached two patches to this mail. These patches disable a
portion of the OpenPGP protocol that the attack is exploiting.
This change should not be user visible. With the patch in place,
this attack will not work using a public-key encrypted message. It
will still work using a passphrase-encrypted message. These
patches will be part of the 1.2.8 and 1.4.1 releases of GnuPG.

5) The full paper is available at http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/033
It's a great piece of work.

David

Back's Back

After a couple days of running, I got back on the erg today. It wasn't bad. Jonas' suggestions about my technique made a world of difference! Maybe we'll have Saturday off yet. After napping this afternoon, sleeping in on Saturday sounds terrific.

Of Dongles, Tapers, and Seahorses

Today's been interesting. After classes and lunch I spent the day at the EIB. While I was waiting for Mike to finish working on his code, I checked the status of the USB dongle for my phone and the pint glasses. The dongle has shipped! From Greenville no less. The glasses are still in limbo.

In Seahorse related news, I've been working on making photo id's work. I've figured out how to do it, now to just sit down and do it. src/seahorse-key-ops.c

Taper #1 was a bust! We tried turning the entire 6" taper all at once. Big Mistake. After we had turned the first 5 segments of the taper, the taper began to deform while we were working on the 6th. That taper now has a lovely oscillation down the side of it. We decided to change how we made taper #2. This time we measured and scored the brass rod we're using, and then fed a little at a time out of the chock of the lathe. This method seems to be working well, although at present we have no way of tapping the center of the small end.

Of Beer and Lasagna

After Saturday's 500m relay, today has been a day of relaxation. Early morning, ;) Laundry, Homework, and Beer Brewing. Currently the Martinsare visiting for the Super Bowl. Mama Martin has graciously provided pans of lasagna.

The latest batch of beer from the Oarsman Brewing Company is a brown ale similar in nature to Newcastle. Synchronize your watches gentlemen! It's 4 weeks till another great batch of ale!

Hopefully, I'll get to tuck into the batch of amber ale; made over break with my dad.

Erging and Glassware

Wow does practice ever take it out of me. Yesterday was three 2k's and today was 2 6k's. I'm pleased with the 6k's because the second was faster than the first.

I received an invoice for the glasses today, so hopefully they will arrive next week. I'm not looking forward to moving 12-54 lb cases.

Silicone Bracelets

I kid you not, these would sell great along side our t-shirts and pint glasses at sprints. Maybe Ian will front the cash?

Glass Order

Well, the glasses are ordered. 12 cases of 48 a piece. I hope this all can be shipped UPS instead of it being palletized and shipped freight.

Next stop Clemson Crew plastic bracelets!

Departmental Awards Application

Well, here goes. In all of the semesters I've been a senior, I think at least 4 now, I have not yet garnered a senior award. My 9 o'clock class was canceled so I took time to fill out the application. Janet said it was a numbers game dependent on who filled things out. We'll see I suppose.

Test Row

Today at practice I test rowed a Wintech light weight single. It was
a lot of fun. The high point was not falling in. Today would have been
the wrong day for that. I did get wet when I caught a few crabs. The
Wintech rep was very helpful. Hopefully, he'll be back March 26 for Clemson Sprints.

I feel like I did well in the single, and feel much better about wanting
to buy one now.

2K Erg Test

Today at practice, we pulled a 2K Erg test. I said my goal was to pull a 1:48/500m split or at least beat 1:50/500m. Well, thanks to my awsome boat mates and team mates I pulled a 1:47.1/500m. That's a personal best at 7:08 for the 2K. I felt so sick but was very pleased with the result.

First Go

Tonight was the Clemson Crew Board meeting. It was 3 hours long, but hopefully a lot of worthwhile stuff was acomplished.

I think I'm finally set on ordering 576 Clemson Crew pint glasses. That's 24 cases and I hope they will all sell. They're $5 a piece, and I will ship to anyone ordering 2 or more glasses as long as they pay for the shipping and packaging.

I did some Seahorse debugging today, there seems to be something odd going on with src/seahorse-key-manager.glade.