Adam's Corner

Fait Accompli

2009-08-19T13:47:00.003-05:00

On Monday I successfully defended my PhD dissertation. It's been 5 months since I passed my comprehensive exam so I missed this development cycle entirely, but I'm looking forward to getting back to hacking and mapping.

Since I've completed my stint in Clemson, I will soon be moving to my house in Virginia. I'm a little wary of starting my new job on the 31^st, but it will be an interesting change from being a graduate student. I'm looking forward to my parents, my brother, and his fiancee visiting next week to celebrate our birthday. Since my parents will be moving to Europe soon, I'll hopefully be able to meet some of my Gnomies from across the pond.

Lockpicking and Security

2009-06-19T10:24:00.004-05:00

No doubt in the past day or so people have seen on boing boing a Wired article about Marc Tobias picking Medeco's "high security" locks. From the article, the claim high security means something specific in the industry, being able to withstand compromise for 10 or more strictly 15 minutes. These locks have been specifically hardened to resist attacks and you have no doubt been wondering about the security of the lock on the front door of your home.

Before you run out and buy a more "secure" lock for your home, let's discuss some security concerns that affect your purchasing decision.

Do you have windows made from bullet proof glass on your home? If so, the lock on your front door may be your weak point. If not, consider that a non-savy criminal can defeat your multi-hundred dollar/pound/euro lock with a cheap brick or a rock from your landscaping (maybe you want to reconsider leaving break in tools around your front yard). This goes double if you have another exterior door that's glass or that a similar high security lock can't be affixed to. Remember that unless you have a facade constructed entirely of thick, well mortared masonry, a persistent attacker could easily cut through your wall with tools available at any home improvement store. Any system is only as secure as its weakest point.

Let's also consider the rate of home break ins. The US Department of Justice provides statistics on historical trends of household burglery defined as "Unlawful or forcible entry or attempted entry of a residence." The following chart shows the national rate of burglery per 1000 homes from 1973 - 2005 (clicking through will take you to the numerical data).

Since this is a national average, you can reduce the rate of incidence by your choice of neighborhoods/areas to live in.

If we assume that your chances of actually being broken into are small, 29.5 per 1000 homes in 2005, and your locks and windows are actually insecure and only useful for keeping the honest honest, is your money better spent upgrading insecure locks, windows and walls or limiting the consequences of such an unlikely event? By all means, lock your doors and windows, but also make sure you carry an appropriate home or renters insurance policy and have documented what you own and their approximate value. This evidence should be stored, like your backups, in a secured off-site location such as a safe deposit box. You could also opt to store this material in a heavy, fire and flood proof safe in your home. Keep in mind that safes can also be cracked, but the walls of the safe are more hardened than the walls, windows and locks of your home and you're trying to raise the cost of acquiring the contents beyond the value of the contents (much like the premise behind using digital encryption). If you opt for a "fire proof" safe keep in mind that many of them work by removing oxygen from the enclosure with a foam or such and not by limiting the heat delivered, which can erase magnetic media.

In closing, "Don't Panic." Be prudent, but keep in mind the actual rate of such attacks on your home's security and take appropriate steps that will aid you in the event of any catastrophic event in your home.

GPG Key Transition

2009-06-11T10:53:00.002-05:00

A signed version of the below message is available at http://www.gnome.org/~sadam/sadam-KeyTransitionStatement-2009-06-11.asc

Thu Jun 11 11:43:50 EDT 2009

For a number of reasons, i've recently set up a new OpenPGP key, and
will be transitioning away from my old one.

The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but i prefer all
future correspondence to come to the new one. I would also like this
new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust. This message is
signed by both keys to certify the transition.

the old key was:

pub 1024D/7108E308 2002-01-14
Key fingerprint = D86C 9E6D AA49 FBD2 33C6 7EF9 8D4D 6868 7108 E308

And the new key is:

pub 2048R/18F94934 2009-06-11
Key fingerprint = F4AE 5B6B 29A4 355A 0EC1 0B4C AC5D 54B8 18F9 4934

To fetch my new key from a public key server, you can simply do:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-key 18F94934

If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is
signed by the old one:

gpg --check-sigs 18F94934

If you don't already know my old key, or you just want to be double
extra paranoid, you can check the fingerprint against the one above:

gpg --fingerprint 18F94934

If you are satisfied that you've got the right key, and the UIDs match
what you expect, I'd appreciate it if you would sign my key:

gpg --sign-key 18F94934

Lastly, if you could upload these signatures, i would appreciate it.
You can either send me an e-mail with the new signatures (if you have
a functional MTA on your system):

gpg --armor --export 18F94934 | mail -s 'OpenPGP Signatures' adam.schreiber@gmail.com

Or you can just upload the signatures to a public keyserver directly:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-key 18F94934

Please let me know if there is any trouble, and sorry for the
inconvenience.

Cheers,

--sadam

Summer of Code Accepted Students Announced

2009-04-20T17:16:00.003-05:00

Congratulations to the accepted students. We received over 140 proposals this year and it was indeed a competitive process. The admins would like to thank all of the GNOME mentors that made our (the Admins) lives easier by participating in the commenting, scoring, and selecting process.

This year we were unable to get the students (accepted and rejected) email addresses from the system so our acceptance and better luck next year emails have been sent to the gnome-soc-list. If you were accepted and haven't yet subscribed to that list, please do so ASAP as emails concerning accounts and such will be coming out soon. Also, contact your mentors. They're waiting to hear from you and get you started on your way to being integrated into our fantastic community.

Thank you to all the students that applied and watch this space and the lists for continuing SoC updates.

Short Timer

2009-04-18T17:16:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I officially became a short timer at Clemson with the successful defense of my PhD research proposal. The next several months will be filled with the remaining work to complete my research and write my dissertation.

Ph.D. Proposal

2009-03-30T09:43:00.004-05:00

I'm excited because my Ph.D. Proposal is off of my desk and has been sent to my committee. Presentation preparation is to ensue.

Salsa on the installment plan

2009-03-19T07:10:00.003-05:00

I was at the home improvement store yesterday and decided to try my hand at some container gardening. Here's a picture after I got everything planted.

GNOME Accepted For GSoC 2009

2009-03-19T07:05:00.002-05:00

We've been accepted as an organization for Google's Summer of Code 2009! If you want to help judge applications and/or be a mentor, go to http://socghop.appspot.com/ and sign up.

NB: Right now the interface to accept people as mentors only shows your "link id" or "username" filled out in your profile to the admins and not your "Display Name". Please enter something recognizable, either your nick from GNOME/IRC or firstnamelastname.

SoC Organization Application

2009-03-11T09:32:00.004-05:00

GNOME's application has been submitted and developers and maintainers will be able to sign up when/if we are accepted.

Remember to continue suggesting project ideas at our ideas page. We're going to start triaging ideas this weekend but will continue to triage as they come in.

Watch this space for more details as they come in.

Dear Blockbuster,

2009-03-10T22:14:00.005-05:00

I no longer find your service to meet my needs. I expressly chose you over Netflix because I could exchange DVD's in the store and while the next items in my queue were shipping, I would have something to watch. I don't have a cable TV subscription and thus watch a lot of movies and TV on DVD. Your new policy of counting my store rentals against my total number of rentals and not shipping the next items in my queue until they're returned defeats the purpose of subscribing to your service. Netflix is less expensive per month, has free streaming with their unlimited plan ~~that works with Linux~~, and has faster DVD turn around rates (anecdotal evidence from nearby friends with Netflix). The cure for bad service is not worse service. I will be cancelling my subscription with you as soon as I figure out how to migrate my queue to Netflix.

So long,

Adam

PS:
Lazy web - So far I've found no easy way to migrate my queue from one to the other. Please let me know if you know of one.

Netflix - If you're listening, other Blockbuster Total Access members that heard this policy explained to them in the stored sounded just as peeved. You could have a windfall if you provided an easy way to import my queue from blockbuster, say CSV or such.

Update: The streaming doesn't work on Linux as I've now found out. mea culpa.

Signingparty update 2

2009-02-17T16:49:00.003-05:00

I recently found that the order in which our DBus interface spits out the display name of a selected key had changed from name (comment) <email> to name <email> (comment) which produced garbled output from the signingparty tool I wrote. I've fixed it but if it changes again it will need to patched again.

Here it is: signingparty.c

And the command line magic to compile it:

gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs gio-2.0` -D LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall



Google Summer of Code 2009 Call for Ideas
2009-02-12T17:10:00.001-05:00


Devs, Hackers, Code Monkeys, Lend us your ideas!

The time is upon us once again to prepare for Google's Summer of Code.
 Pages have been prepared on the wiki for this event, but your ideas
appear to be missing [1,2].  Students will be able to start proposing
their projects on March 23, but we'd like to make sure there are
plenty of projects from them to choose from and have mentors ready to
volunteer their time.

Please visit [2] and enter your project ideas under the "New Untriaged
Ideas" section.  A committee will be formed up later to triage the
ideas prior to the opening of the proposal period.

If you would like to volunteer your time to mentor but don't have a project
 idea, surf over and claim one.  Mentoring is an awesome way to get more
involved with the community and introduce someone to it.

If you would like to throw your hat in the ring for the triaging or
selection committees and other GSoC related tasks, pop on over to
#soc-admin, join the soc-mentors-list and let one of the
administrators for the program know you want to be involved in making
GNOME rock.

This year's administrators are Adam Schreiber, Daniel Siegel and Sandy
Armstrong.

Cheers,

The GNOME Google Summer of Code Administrators

[1] http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009
[2] http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas


Update
2009-02-10T10:10:00.005-05:00
I just realized today as my dad was asking my brother and I about how to increase his online presence and searchability that I hadn't made a post since Election Day.  Wow... The main reason is I'm a PhD student trying to finish my dissertation up in time to graduate in August.  Here's a quick run down in bullet form of what I've been up to.

 Improving my local OpenStreetMap data.  I've traced the two lakes above Hartwell with the Lakewalker plugin to josm and finished Hartwell itself.  These are enormous lakes!  I've also added data for the Appalachian Trail from the beginning to about Knoxville, TN, more to come I'm sure.

 Writing and researching are my two main daily tasks.  Hopefully in the near future we can add measuring to that list.

 February 3rd I gave a very long presentation on Seahorse at the CLUG meeting.  We're having a key signing party at next week's meeting along with a gent from Fedora who is bringing a couple of XO laptops.  If you're in the Clemson area next Tues, stop on by.

 Sporadically working out.




Voting
2008-11-04T09:37:00.002-05:00
As a citizen I have done my duty.  I encourage you if you haven't already voted today and are registered, to do so as well.

Remember the number to call if you face any voting irregularities is 1-866-OUR-VOTE.  My polling place was fairly empty and relaxed.  I was in and out in about 5 minutes.  

Note: I didn't vote for all of the local positions, but I did vote for the County Sheriff.  How great would it be to live in a county where the sheriff's name is Rob Crooks.  I'm not making this up folks.


Electioneering
2008-10-30T15:17:00.003-05:00
I just got back from spending some time listening to Congressmen Berry and Clyburn, house majority whip, stump for Obama and Jane Dyer, candidate for the Third Congressional District which includes Clemson.  I managed to ask the first question after they were speaking which was:

"Senator Obama and the DNC have made a historic move against the corrupting influence of money by refusing to take donations from PAC's and lobbyists, will you all stand with them in your own campaigns and push for the DCCC to do so as well?"

Congressman Clyburn fielded it, saying that he would not agree to unilateral disarmament and reminded everyone that the Supreme Court already ruled against a law that banned money from those groups indicating that money == speech.  Congressman Berry made a similar point and said he wished the law had stuck.  

Afterward, I handed Congressman Berry, one of Congressman Clyburn's aides and Miss Dyer links to Change Congress and encouraged them to fill out where they stand.

No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, please remember to vote next Tuesday!


Vrrrroooom
2008-08-21T09:20:00.001-05:00
I passed my motorcycle driving test yesterday. w007!


Signingparty - Update
2008-08-21T09:15:00.003-05:00
Thanks to a suggestion from commenter Ondra on the LaTeX and some additional spare time I wiped the TODO's from my little program.

signingparty.c

It's been requested to include this in seahorse-plugins, so it will probably make its way there in time for 2.26.

Update: I forgot to mention that a new compile line was needed to add the auto-launching:
gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs gio-2.0` -D LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall



Back from Chicago
2008-08-19T13:39:00.004-05:00
I'm back from the URSI GA in Chicago and back in the office.  While I was in Chicago, I wrote a little program to auto-generate a bingo board in LaTeX for a little game I dreamt up.  While that program will probably not see the light of day, it inspired me to write something else.

I've been frustrated with the user un-friendliness of existing scripts to generate a sheet suitable for use at a key signing party.  This frustration led me to write a program that uses libcryptui to select keys for the sheet and inserts them into a table in LaTeX.  It's now at a usable point so I thought I would make it available:

signingparty.c

Compile with: gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` -D  LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall


An example of the output is party.tex

And the processed PDF party.pdf

Obligatory Screenshot:


TODO:
 * Strip comments from display names (what's in parenthesis normally)
 * Fix table grid lines (Help from a LaTeX guru would be appreciated)
 * Auto-process LaTeX to PDF (via Rubber)


Marathon Training
2008-07-26T20:25:00.003-05:00
My friend Matt and I are training to row a marathon and just completed week 1.  Only 15 more weeks till race day. WoOoOoOo!  I did about 23 miles of running this week and our plan has us getting up to rowing(x1)/running(x1)/cycling(x4) a total of 51 miles in our peak milage week.  I'm very glad there's a plan to get from here to there.


Fair Tax
2008-07-17T20:11:00.004-05:00
I just finished reading The Fair Tax Book today.  I had heard about the fair tax before and have visited the website but I still learned a lot.

For those that don't know, the Fair Tax is a law in congress, HR 25 and S 1025, that aims to eliminate all personal income, estate, FICA, medicare and corporate taxes, abolish the IRS and replace them with an inclusive national sales tax of 23%.  This means that if you buy a $100 item, the retailer keeps $77 and sends $23 upstream to the federal government.  Because the taxes and cost of compliance with federal tax laws are already embedded in the cost of every item you buy (estimated to be around 23%) prices for the consumer are expected to remain the same or slightly decrease.  Imagine the ability to take home all of your pay every two weeks and only pay tax when you choose to spend it.

Some of you may be wondering about those with little to no income, but not to worry the plan takes care of that by "prebating" every head of household in the US with the amount of sales tax on a twelfth of the inflation adjusted poverty level for the size of their family.  This means that the poor's tax burden is removed entirely and still receive goods and services from the federal government.

I'm on board, but a ground swell of support is required to convince congress that this is a desired course of action.  I encourage you to investigate the plan and then contact your friendly neighborhood congress critter with your opinion. 

I consider this to be compatible with the Change Congress movement as the simplification of the tax law to a point where there are no loop holes or exceptions for anyone will lead to a congress more beholden to their constituents.


xkcd T-Shirt idea
2008-06-27T00:11:00.005-05:00
The 17th frame of today's xkcd is crying out to be made into a t-shirt.  Photo shop merge portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Barack Obama's face with the dialogue from that frame.

If you make it, let me know and I'll send you a shipping address and my t-shirt size. ;)

I would also take one of the frame that says "I LOVE CRYPTOGRAPHY".


Fitness
2008-05-27T20:05:00.003-05:00
I'm with Eric on this one.  I know plenty of scientists and engineers that run, bike, climb and participate in other sports.  Although for athletic people I don't put much stock in BMI.  For instance, mine is 24.8 and 25 is considered over weight.  For athletes, percent body fat is a much more accurate albeit more difficult to measure indicator of fitness level.


Seahorse libgnome/ui Free
2008-05-04T21:16:00.004-05:00
With the help of patches from Saleem Abdulrasool (compnerd) I have spent the afternoon eliminating libgnome/ui from seahorse and seahorse-plugins (bug #524018).

The port of seahorse to gio is already complete and the port of seahorse-plugins should happen fairly soon (A big thanks to Saleem for volunteering to look at this too).

There's also a icon refresh underway that will hopefully bear fruit so stay tuned to unstable!


Omelet in a Mug
2008-04-30T08:04:00.004-05:00
I got home from morning practice and wanted a fully cooked breakfast without the fully cooked hassle.  I decided, drawing inspiration from Lunch in a Box, to try cooking eggs in a coffee mug.  

I started with two eggs and scrambled them in situ.  Then I added a handful of frozen cubed potatoes, some minced sharp cheddar cheese, a spoonful of salsa and stirred.  I nuked it all for 2 minutes on high and voila, Omelet in a Mug.

*WARNING* Watch your mug carefully during the last 30s so that the cheese doesn't boil over the top of your mug.


Vrooooom
2008-04-13T15:49:00.004-05:00
I spent my off weekend from crew related activities to learn how to ride a motorcycle.  It's been on my todo list for a almost a year, but the timing was always off.  I decided to take the Beginning Motorcycle class offered by SC Rider Ed at Greenville Tech, one of the local community colleges.

The course consisted of 3 sessions on Fri, Sat and Sun and was taught by Eric Diehl.  There was some classroom work on Friday night followed by riding practice on Sat and Sunday.  The class provided motorcycles in the form of Honda Rebels.  

I would recommend taking a safety class from the American Motorcyclist Association to anyone looking to start riding.  There's so much info to cover, a friend or relative might leave something out.  Before this weekend, I had never ridden a motorcycle or operated a manual vehicle and I was able to have fun and succeed at the exercises practiced.  Eric did a great job of emphasizing the fundamentals and I now feel confident I want to get a bike.


Slogan for the Democratic Party
2008-03-30T18:21:00.003-05:00
In a response to Nat

"Freedom, Peace and Choice make America Great. Democratic Party."

Of course, this only works because the "conservatives" have leaned toward becoming fascist, war hawks.  It's interesting that a true conservative would espose two out of three of the above on the basis of personal liberties and responsibility.


GNOME SoC 2008
2008-03-18T17:58:00.002-05:00
GNOME is joining Google for the fourth annual Summer of Code program.  We need your ideas and expertise as mentors to make this our best year yet and bring more awesome Free Software into existence.  This year, we would like to see projects about the integration between various
GNOME modules. Other types of projects are of course also welcome, like new programs, bling, etc.

As long as there are mentors available, we are also taking SoC proposals for GNOME related technologies and projects such as GStreamer, Avahi, Beagle, Bluez and Telepathy so don't feel left out if your favorite project isn't part of GNOME or just isn't yet.  We will also be collaborating with KDE to mentor freedesktop.org related projects.

Please submit your ideas and volunteer to mentor on our wiki at http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2008/Ideas.  Ideas that are posted will be triaged by the GNOME SoC Admins based on mentor support and feasibility.

Note that the student submission deadline is March 31st so get your great ideas up so students will have plenty of time to help our favorite desktop keep rocking!

-- GNOME Summer of Code Admins


Lessig '08
2008-02-20T09:22:00.002-05:00
What do we want?

Change!

When do we want it?

Now!

I've been following Larry Lessig's path from free culture pioneer to corruption crime fighter and I agree with him that he cannot make the changes in our culture he wants to see until the culture of corruption has been addressed.  To this end I have decided to support his possible run for congress in the CA-12 and have done so financially.  It's time to put our money where our mouths are and make the change happen!  

If you want change,

If you want hope, 

Support Lessig for Congress.




N810
2008-01-27T16:03:00.000-05:00
This post is written from my new N810.  Thanks Nokia and Maemo for making the discount program happen.  I'll be installing Ubuntu over my venerable Slack+DLG install to get the development environment working properly.  DLG, I love the work you've done but need to be able to use the documentation without having to blaze a new path.  Keep up the good work!


Come on ......
2007-12-10T14:10:00.000-05:00
Evolution, the size of your preferences window is shameful.  I'm using the C locale with a resolution of 1280x800 and the preferences dialog cannot fit completely on my screen.  This is a known bug at lower resolutions as well.  It appears that the "Mail Preferences" selection in the left frame is the culprit.  The "General tab in particular since none of the others occupy the whole window.  Please fix this!


Success!
2007-12-06T17:06:00.000-05:00
I successfully defended my Masters thesis Monday afternoon and my submitted manuscript was approved yesterday.  This means that aside from my math final next Friday I'm a free man.  I've been using my newly found free time to triage and fix some bugs in seahorse and upload state borders into OpenStreetMap.  So far I've uploaded borders for SC, NC, FL, GA, TN, KY, AL and MS.  I'm hoping to work my way across the country in the next couple of days.

I have some seahorse features I've decided to work on the next couple of weeks.  They are in no particular order: adding passwords to gnome-keyring in the key manager, ACL lists for saved secrets in the properties of saved secrets, and possibly some evolution integration.


Tinder
2007-11-19T12:55:00.000-05:00
Luis: While it would be nice for it to be "open hardware" already, I wonder how long until someone hacks the Kindle to run Gutenburg project texts.  Because it runs Wikipedia, I can't imagine it would be hard to do.  However, it's very understandable that it would be the antithesis of Amazon's business model to provide quality free content and furthermore would be rude to use the wireless link(supported by buying items) to load Free content on the device. On the other hand, the USB link is fair game. ;)


Gmail encryption/signing
2007-11-12T14:56:00.000-05:00
I spoke too soon as this signed email does not verify correctly.  Google why can't we get this right?


GMail part deux
2007-11-11T22:43:00.000-05:00
I haven't noticed a lot of changes with the new GMail interface that has been recently delivered, which for the most part is a decidedly good thing.  However, I decided to test out Seahorse's Epiphany plugin with the new plain text entry box and was delighted when my test email was delivered and the signature was good and the decryption didn't have a problem with the word wrapping.  This was a major thorn in my side; preventing me from using signatures with my sent mail.  Thank you to whichever brave Googler  purposefully or inadvertently fixed this featurebug.

Also, I would like to join the band wagon in thanking the crowd over at Nokia and Maemo for accepting my application for a discounted N810.  It will probably lead to an increase in my Verizon tax, but will be worth it.


Success
2007-10-14T16:52:00.000-05:00
Since the end of August, my friend Kat and I have been coaching Clemson Crew's novice women squad, .  This weekend we traveled to Chattanooga, TN to participate in our first competition of the season, the Chattanooga Head Race.  While Kat and I are volunteers, we were paid in full for our efforts of the last month and a half by 2 out of 3 of our ladies' boats bringing home medals.  Even though the third boat didn't place, they made a valiant effort and were only 6s off of the 3rd place time.  We left Chattanooga extremely proud of our ladies and look forward to the next 3 weeks of practice before we again travel to Chattanooga for the Head of the Chattahoochie.


Cory Doctorow
2007-10-11T08:26:00.000-05:00
Cory made an appearance at Clemson University yesterday and I was lucky enough to break away from work to hear him speak.  His talk was titled  "From International Standards to Web Practices, IP Mania Has Undermined the Idea of Real Property, of Freedom, of Creativity."  It was held at the lovely and historic Strom Thurmond Institute (see picture below).

Cory was an entertaining and informative speaker and I encourage any of you that get the chance to make time for hearing him.  While the part of his talk concerning licenses was familiar to me, as I suspect would be to many of my p.g.o readers as well, I enjoyed his history lesson concerning WIPO's formation and how our (U.S.) free trade treaties are forcing developing countries to adopt our draconian IP laws as well as other measures that we would not tolerate in our country.  His example of one is our treaty with Russia forcing them to license their optical media presses and be subject to command inspections.  Good thing we aren't as worried about their printing presses eh?  I thought his call to arms at the end was especially well received and when an audience member pointed out that the talk was being recorded and asked if it would be available, Cory released it in  its entirety to the public domain.  As such, when I can get a copy, I'll post it on YouTube and add a link from this blog to it.

Thanks Cory for taking time out of your busy schedule to visit us in Clemson!


            Cory Doctorow              
Also, because someone on Flickr asked what's studied at the institute, I'll explain it here.  The institute houses all of the documents from Strom Thurmond's time in the U.S. Senate.  It is much akin to a president's library but less expensive and without the touristy stuff.  It also houses the special collections from Clemson's library.  The research arm of the institute is concerned with public policy at all levels of government.


Showing the GPG Key
2007-10-05T09:37:00.000-05:00
Richard:

This might be an instance where Seahorse's DBus interface could help you.  If a user is part of the web of trust already, the dialog could possibly be skipped completely.  Also, the key in question could be automatically acquired  using the DiscoverKeys method.

In any case, I agree with the other comments regarding your "signature identifier" field in that the full finger print should be shown.  Also, signature identifier is not a commonly used term that I'm familiar with and in any case it's a key identifier and not a signature identifier.

Let us (the seahorse devs) know if there's anything in the DBus interface that's missing that would make your life easier.


Haiku on the Fly
2007-09-27T09:00:00.000-05:00
Breeze wafts through the trees
Undulating boughs above
Birds chirp merrily 



OpenStreetMap Presentation
2007-08-26T14:28:00.000-05:00
This past Thursday, I gave a presentation on OpenStreetMap at the first meeting of CLUG for the fall semester.  While a little long (about an hour and twenty minutes with demonstration) I think it was well received. 

The slide deck (in PDF and LaTeX formats) and presentation resources are available from here.
  The area used for the demo can be viewed as part of a slippy map here.


Welcome
2007-08-15T10:32:00.000-05:00
Glynn, Welcome to the brotherhood of brewers.  In the immortal words of Ben Franklin, "There cannot be good living where there is not good drinking."


My Linux Success Story
2007-07-18T12:00:00.000-05:00
This is my Linux success story.  Well,  actually not mine because that was long long ago in a galaxy far far away but more of my adviser's.  He bought a new desktop computer for his home use and when faced with learning Vista or sticking with XP came to my office and asked about installing Linux on it.  At this point, I'm ecstatic with thoughts of seamless transferal of OO.o documents and a return to LaTeX for  typesetting his documents.
Being a good member of CLUG it took me all of 2s to decided that our official installfest distro of choice, Ubuntu, was right for him.

After his white box computer arrived I burned an ISO of 7.04 and walked down the hall to get the install going.  The live cd aspect of it flawlessly detected all of the hardware on the machine and after answering a few short questions the install was just like imaging a machine.

Post-install, I demonstrated Synaptic to get the Nvidia drivers, LaTeX and added Clemson's repositories for MATLAB and VPN software.  I also installed the LaTeX plugin for Gedit which really ought to be packaged in Universe (hint hint).

Due to the short interval before the conference, I couldn't convince him to use Impress or LaTeX for his presentation, but he did generate his figures with OO.o Draw.  He really likes what he sees and can't understand why anyone would need Windows.  Maybe when we get back from Ottawa I'll get to install it on his  main machine.

Cheers to the Ubuntu guys for making the install so painless and all of my favorite Gnomies for keeping the desktop rocking!


GUADEC
2007-07-15T21:04:00.000-05:00
I'm sorry that I won't be joining all of you in Birmingham this week as I am in the final stages of preparing for a conference in Ottawa next week.  I'm even sorrier that I'm missing the chance to meet my SoC student, Pinar.
  She should be at GUADEC, so everyone be very friendly and let her know "Don't Panic."

If any of you are in the Ottawa area next week and want to join up, Hub and I are having a beer BoF meet up at some point you're more than welcome to get in on.  Just let one of us know.

Also, I'm up for key signing, impromptu or otherwise, while I'm visiting our great white neighbor to the north.


Research Update
2007-07-05T19:43:00.000-05:00
Sadly, there hasn't been much coding of late.  I'm no longer blocking on my professor and am working at full speed to get ready for URSI USNC in Ottawa at the end of the month.  After struggling with derivatives of Legendre functions, I managed to blitz through a good bit of analysis this afternoon.  Hooray!  This made up the bulk of the work for one of three papers my prof and I are presenting.  The shop has finished 2 out of the 3 prolate spheroids I needed to make measurements and hopefully I will receive the third tomorrow.  Making my calibration measurements went well, but I did have to cannibalize a dry cleaning clothes hanger to make a Teflon plug puller.  It turns out that no matter how slick you think Teflon is if you have enough surface area friction matters. 

List of things to complete in time for the Conference:
Prolate Spheroidal Monopole Measurements
Comparison of calculated input admittance to measured
Rayleigh Series Quasi-static Analysis and comparison to measurements
Elliptic channel with PEC cylinder code
Elliptic channel figures
It is quite the list but finishing the first three items will satisfy all of the non-writing work needed to finish my masters.  Let us all hope I survive to make it to Ottawa!


In response:
2007-06-19T13:51:00.000-05:00
I received a couple of comments regarding my last post on Seahorse's GNOME Keyring integration and would like to respond to them here so everyone not following the comments on my posts can see them. :P

Étienne: I would suppose this would depend on how you changed your session/login password if you did it via the About Me control applet, it could probably be modified to change the keyring password as well.  I'm not sure how secure entries would be implemented for it without copying code though, perhaps with GNOME keyring's new secure memory API?

Esteban:
- What about thinkfinger integration? It seems like about some of gnome password dialogs support this (gdm,console), some do in a broken way (gksudo) and others don't (keyring manager, gnome-screensaver).

This might be useful but would need to be implemented on the gnome-keyring end.  Luckily gnome-keyring is just a generic secret store and can do many such things.  Also, I would imagine hardware for testing would be required.

- Why doesn't gnome-keyring just use your user password as the master password? Or, why can't gnome-keyring store my user password and my sudo password? One way or the other would seem more unified and consistent.

gnome-keyring can't simply use your user password unless you enter it as your master password because as a user, you don't have access to the hash of your system password stored in /etc/shadow.  Étienne's comment mentioned libpam-keyring, but it's my understanding that you still have to originally set gnome-keyring to use your session password.  Although now  you should be able to get around the problem mentioned at the  libpam-keyring site of not being able to change your keyring password.   I suppose gnome-keyring could store your sudo password but I'm not sure that would be advisable (i.e. you might as well always run as root).   This would probably require a patch to gksudo/whichever graphical auth library you're using for privilege escalation.

- It would be nice if gnome-keyring had some notion of "important" passwords vs everything else so that it can just go ahead and fill in the right values when I don't care sort of like firefox does when it doesn't have a master password set. Something in between where on a per password basis I can say "Always ask for master" would be cool.

This might be where an editor is needed to be able to set/unset the application access permissions.  Right now if you select 'Always Allow' or 'Deny' there's no way to change that.

- Firefox and other apps integration: Firefox reimplements exactly the same functionality. Could gnome-keyring be swapped out in the gnome native builds like they have done for print and file dialogs?

I'm not sure about Firefox, but possibly Epiphany.  There are some thoughts on that on l.g.o.


Seahorse - GNOME Keyring Integration
2007-06-19T10:17:00.000-05:00
For all of you that have set your GNOME Keyring master password and long to change it, long no more!  This previously missing functionality is now available in the 2.19.4 release of Seahorse.  The text entries are "secure" in that your passwords will never be paged out of memory onto the disk and with recent upgrades to gnome-keyring itself, they shouldn't be paged out there either (development branch only).  Here's what the tab in the Encryption Preferences control applet looks like upon a successful change:




Behold the power of GNOME!
2007-06-06T14:35:00.000-05:00
I'm a little bit behind on my /. reading, but today I noticed an article published Monday about the FireGPG extension for Firefox.

You may be thinking, "This news sounds familiar" and you'd be right sort of.  That's right, if you've been using Epiphany and Seahorse, this functionality has been available since September in development versions.  That's a good 6 months before a similar extension was available for FF.  Behold the power of GNOME!

I wonder if they have a similar problem with GMail inserting <cr> or <lf> into text they want to verify?

Also for the keen observer, check out the FireGPG icon they included in the URL bar:      Yep, that's the icon Seahorse provides for use in the GNOME menus and as our window icon.  Hooray reuse!  I wonder if they could use our DBus API if it's available?

Also, currently we don't have  icons for the context menu items in our extension (I'm not sure FireGPG's are the most appropriate for this) but if anyone has icon ideas or better yet icons ;) you know where to put them.


Hop to it
2007-05-20T19:01:00.000-05:00
Now that I have a charger for my digital camera, I put it use taking some snaps of my hops vines in the garden.

Willamette Hops

Centennial Hops

The trellis itself.

Growing got off to a slow start, but ever since the Willamette vine reached the trellis things have really been taking off!

It's a shame that I've now used that blog title and will now be required to come up with new bad puns regarding hops.


License Plates
2007-05-15T12:12:00.000-05:00
There was a SNAFU with my registration and car tax this past week that led to a trip to the DMV, a trip to the county court house and then another to the DMV.  When I made it back to the DMV I was quite ticked with the system.  To make up for it and improve my day, I purchased the following plate:


I consider this a response to the "In God We Trust" plates that everyone and their brother is running around South Carolina with:


I would like to thank the Secular Humanists of the Low Country for making such a plate available.

Update (20070516): Hosting my own plate images, let me know if they still don't work.


Long time no blog
2007-05-05T18:00:00.000-05:00
I realize it's been almost half a month since my last post, but end of semester duties and such take precedence.  So in no particular order...

Seahorse: I've been made a co-maintainer and have mostly been focused on bug fixing and mentoring our SoC student, Pinar.

Open Street Maps: It owns my soul and is my new favorite form of procrastination.  There is a warning on one of their pages about mapping becoming compulsive.  I apparently read the warning and continued without a slackening of pace.  OSM has replaced my attempt to use Google Maps' MyMaps feature to detail Clemson University.  I have mostly been prepping for a future job with the NRO and updating the map via Yahoo!'s donated aerial imagery.  If you've ever wondered where trains go and come from, the imagery is a good way to find out and why not map the tracks at the same time?  I have purchased a USB GPS receiver (I know the box says Microsoft, but the receiver can be used with pure FOSS in the form of gpsd.) and can't wait to hit the trails with my bike to map the Clemson Experimental Forest.  This may be the final straw in purchasing a N800, although if some kind embedded developer were to intervene on my behalf I may be interested in performing a Maemo port of  Seahorse :).

School: Grades aren't in yet but between a take home exam and an in exam presentation, I can't help but believe the semester ended well.  Hopefully, the metal shop will find the time to machine the parts I need to make measurements for my Master's thesis so I can wrap that up in time for August's graduation deadlines.

Conferences:  While I probably will be unable to make GUADEC, my paper entitled "Prolate Spheroidal Monopole"
, the subject of my Master's thesis, has been accepted for presentation at the North American Radio Science Meeting in Ottawa from July 22-26.   I'm already planning on trying to crash the Ottawa Linux Users Group picnic that week, but if there are any other Gnomies that would be interested in sharing a pint or signing GPG keys that week shoot me an email.


Google SoC
2007-04-19T10:13:00.000-05:00
I'd like to join the crowd and welcome my mentee, Pinar Yanardağ, to the GNOME community and Google's SoC.  I'm sure her blog will be syndicated in a prominent place soon enough(hint, hint p.g.o admins) so you all will be able to learn about her progress all summer and into the future (hopefully).  She's so on the ball she's already created her own hackergotchi:



She'll be working on integrating Seahorse key selection dialogs(libcryptui) into Evolution as well using Seahorse's  DBus interface for encryption and such.  I'm also hoping to see some rocking integration with the e-d-s address book.

Please join me in welcoming Pinar and all of the other Summer of Coders to our fine community.


Slackware is Hard?!?
2007-04-13T12:10:00.000-05:00
Andrew,

I realize your chart is pointed at the newbie, but quite possibly the only part of a new Slackware install that isn't entirely straight forward is partitioning your disk.  I admit that the installer isn't graphical in nature, but neither is the Windows installer.  For anyone not wanting to manually pick packages to install, the install all option is front and center.  Upgrading Slackware is now as easy as Debian with the slapt-get tool.  Granted that you can't install and update GNOME with slapt-get, as Patrick no longer builds GNOME and no one provides the appropriate repositories, but the folks over at Dropline GNOME do a fantastic job of keeping GNOME up to date with their installer and update applet.

I admit Slackware's not for everyone, but it's not the great evil it's made out to be.


OCRopus
2007-04-11T11:22:00.000-05:00
Philip:

Tablet PC implementation?  Allow beagle/tracker/whichever to search handwritten notes?  Print out handwritten notes as text?  Let the madness ensue.


Google MyMaps
2007-04-10T10:37:00.000-05:00
I've really been digging the new MyMaps feature of Google Maps.  I even started working on a MyMap version of my university.  However, I have a few suggestions/requests that would make this product even more useful for such a large and complicated area.

Allow showing and hiding "overlays" based on the same color.  Also, allow a key for what each colored area means. (Residence Halls, Academic Buildings, Parking Lots, etc.)
Allow showing all areas and points of interest at once and not just those in the order they were created.  Possibly allow sorting of the items allowing non-linear creation. (For instance, all buildings should be shown with their labels all of the time when the buildings overlay is shown)
In their blog post, Google indicates making your map public includes it in the search results, but that doesn't appear to be happening at present. (For instance search for "googleplex building 43" which is clearly marked on their example map of the googleplex.  Also searching for "Clemson Crew Boathouse" doesn't return my campus map or this one.
I think this product has a lot of potential and makes it easy to get directions for places that don't necessarily have physical addresses, like the boathouse, but I'd like to see a little more functionality for "power cartographers".


Message Area Redux
2007-03-23T21:05:00.000-05:00
In response to my earlier post about the message area, there were several more people that voiced the need for such a widget.

In fact pbor in #gnome-hackers voiced a vision I would support:
 
<pbor> sadam: actually I'd prefer to have a sexyer widget upstream :)
<pbor> sadam: it's something I wanted to try for a while but really can't find the time
<pbor> sadam: I want a GtkCurtain widget that drops down from the top (or the side) and covers the text *without* pushing it down
* lucasr|afk creates the page
<pbor> sadam: obviously it should drop down with a smooth animation and maybe be even slightly traslucent for the crack-addicts :)
<pbor> sadam: maybe it could be part of the "Make some core GNOME modules sexier" SoC proposed by vuntz 


Of course I would be happier with a curtain widget that gave the coder the choice of whether to push the text down or not.


Gedit Message Area
2007-03-23T14:43:00.000-05:00
Lucas and Gedit developers,

Is there any interest in pushing the message area widget upstream to gtk or libegg?  I've looked at it and would like to make use of it for Seahorse plugins.  Three of us probably shouldn't be maintaining our own separate copies of the widget.


Weekend Update
2007-03-05T12:46:00.000-05:00
This weekend managed to be fairly productive.  Saturday my roommate, Matt, and I tilled our garden and I finished my hops trellis.  Sunday we planted the garden and returned our borrowed rototiller.  It should only be a matter of time before we are flush with excellent produce.  The climate in SC allows for a very long growing season so we'll probably do a replanting this summer to take advantage of the warm fall weather.  When my hops rhizomes arrive at the end of the month our garden will be "produce complete".

Sunday night the four of us in the house went to see our friend Holly perform in the Vagina Monologues.  We almost didn't get in because of the small theater it was being shown in.  The Clemson ladies that performed it did an excellent job and I'd recommend seeing it if you get the chance.

It's good that so much got done this weekend as regatta season for Clemson Crew kicks off next Saturday in Aiken, SC with the Southeastern Regional Collegiate Sprints.  In addition to being my first regatta as an assistant coach, I'll be racing the unusually popular Open Men's 1x.


GNOME Build Bot
2007-03-01T08:46:00.000-05:00
I noticed that builds of at least seahorse, gnome-applets, and gnome-power-manager are failing with the following error:
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_font_description_get_gravity'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_layout_get_lines_readonly'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libgthread-2.0.so: undefined reference to `g_thread_gettime'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_font_description_set_gravity'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_gravity_get_type'

If anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know.


Respect
2007-02-17T13:10:00.000-05:00
Full Rate, Full Pressure
Straight Down the Course, All Out
Victory For All 



Frustration
2007-02-16T14:13:00.000-05:00
Spheroid Radius
Changing the Convergence Rate
Complex Code Ensues



Numerical Accuracy
2007-02-15T08:37:00.000-05:00
Note: When computing values that need to be numerically accurate and calculated quickly carry any integration inside a summation when only one term in the summation contains the variable of integration.  This results in a massive reduction of things that need to be computed.  That is all.  Carry on.


Daily Haiku
2007-02-15T08:36:00.000-05:00
Azalea Blooms
Songbird Twitters Cheerfully
Sunlight Filters Down



Haiku-a-palooza
2007-02-14T10:50:00.000-05:00
Cherry Blossoms Blow
Near a Tumbling Waterfall
Wind in the Willows

Tall Aspen Reach High
Hawk Soars Over the Meadow
Brother Bear Sleeps



New Seahorse Release
2007-02-13T07:27:00.000-05:00
We've just pushed a new version of seahorse out the door.   Please give us a hand with shaking out any remaining bugs before the 2.18 release by grabbing it and using it.  You don't have to even be a 1337  2.17 using hacker to help,  all of the new features work properly using libraries  available in 2.16 and the appropriate non-gnome libraries, of course.


Qualifed
2007-02-12T12:30:00.000-05:00
This morning PhD qualifier results for Clemson University's ECE Department came in.   The electromagnetics group had a great showing with all 6 members that took the qualifier passing.  Congrats to all of my fellow group members!  Now get back to work !


Google RFE
2007-01-12T10:00:00.000-05:00
If anyone at Google is bored and needs ideas for their 20% time, look no further!

Add the ability to poll confirmed guests to events in Google Calendar.  This would be useful when ordering sandwiches or other food items for meetings or deciding where to go out to lunch.
In the interest of indexing and making all information available, Google could run an OpenPGP key server that synchronizes with the key server network.  When searching for a name with the main search app, a key could be returned as a search result.  In GMail, signatures of messages could be verified and a UI element could be presented to the user.
Add Google Checkout to Google Apps for Domains.  This would allow groups to sell merchandise, collect money for events and trips and accept donations.  Perhaps in the interest of not being evil have reduced or no fees for confirmed non-profit organizations as long as they use Google Words on their Google Pages site.
Those are a few of the ideas I have at the moment, but rest assured if I see any of them implemented I'll post more. :)


The greatest depression ever!
2007-01-04T08:40:00.000-05:00
Given Dave's post on investing with leverage, I'd like to point out that the Great Depression wasn't so much caused by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 as the fact that people had posted their homes as collateral for loans to invest in the stock market.  When the market crashed and the lenders saw that they weren't going to be repaid, they started foreclosing on houses and farms set as collateral.  With people losing their jobs and homes the Great Depression set in.

Cautionary tale aside, people invest with leverage all the time.  In a short sell, one sells stock borrowed from others with the promise to return it by a certain date hoping the price will go down and they will pocket the difference.  In a long sell, stock is purchased at the current price with money the investor has borrowed, often from the brokerage itself,
with the hope the price goes up and they will pocket the difference.  In both of these cases, the non-leveraged portion of the investor's portfolio is used as collateral.  Performing long and short sells requires a margin account with a brokerage of some kind.

Additionally, investors at the Prosper Loan Market Place are using their high credit ratings to secure sub-prime interest loans to invest in other loans on Prosper.  Because the loans on Prosper are unsecured, the speculator could be burned if enough of their purchased loans default.  They would still be on the line for making the monthly payments on the money they borrowed.  I think investing in these characters is attractive for a lot of people because they view it as safer because their money has been lent to a person with a good credit rating to protect.  However, one never knows the confluence of events that could occur.  The speculator's loans could default and they lose their job leaving them to default on their own loan.

I think the real lesson here is that "investing" with leverage is entirely speculative and as a general rule no more than 5% of your portfolio should be  held in  speculative  investments.

Disclaimer: The above does not  construe  actual financial advice.   If you lose all of your money it's your own fault.


Righteous Anger
2006-12-31T09:24:00.000-05:00
Phillip, I'm sick and tired of how you are going on and on about Americans as if we're some homogeneous group.  Not every American likes Bush or voted for him (I've voted against him twice now).  We don't all like the war in Iraq, and not just because we're having trouble there now.  We also are not universally for the death penalty. 

You blame the government we "re-elected", but the government we just elected that is sweepingly different from the current one hasn't taken office yet (It will in January).  I don't expect Bush will ever see the inside of a court room in the Hague, but he should be investigated, impeached and tried criminally here. 

I can't speak for all of GNOME Planet's denizens, but probably a fair share of the Americans that belong here agree with your sentiment.  I just hate how you're expressing it.


Financial Independence
2006-12-13T11:53:00.000-05:00
After reading jamin's blog post with links to desperate measures to get out of debt, I had a discussion with one of my office mates about how one gets into that kind of trouble in the first place.  It turns out it is really easy to make the mistakes that get you there.  If you aren't there already, there are some things you can do to avoid it.

Pay off your credit cards in full every month.  Making only the minimum payment will result in you paying for that geek gadget or shiny object long into the future.
Save for your big purchases.  If you have been lusting over some new toy that you simply can't live without, set aside money every month until you can afford it.  You've been living without it this far and will avoid interest charges when you do buy it.  In fact if you put your savings in a high yield money market account such as ING Direct's (disclosure: I have been very happy with my account there.) you could actually make money on the deal.
Establish a safety cushion.  Sock away at least 3 months worth of living expenses if you're single and more if you're not.  If you have the cushion and hell breaks loose, you will be able to rely on savings instead of credit cards while you weather the storm.
There are plenty of more things you can do, but those are some of the biggies.  Just remember that as the compound interest of the credit cards can work against you, if you have the money invested it can work for you.


Code of Conduct
2006-12-03T16:32:00.000-05:00
I've been following the discussion concerning the Code of Conduct on the foundation-list and agreed with one poster that is concerned about "signing" something on a wiki.  I have now signed the Code of Conduct and made sure there is no question about what exactly I was signing.  

I invite my fellow Gnomies to do likewise using Seahorse's Epiphany plugin, panel applet or Gedit plugin or gnupg on the command line (If that's the way you roll).


Looking Back
2006-11-17T16:16:00.000-05:00
... at this past rowing season it went rather well.  In my first year rowing my single, I took 1st in the lightweight single at the Chattanooga Head Race, Head of the Tennessee and Head of of the South.  At the Head of the Tennessee, my first place contributed to a Clemson Crew sweep of the lightweight men's events including the four and eight.  At the Head of the South my roommate Matt and I beat our roommates, the Chris's, in the Champ Double event to take second in the maiden race of the team's new WinTech double (bragging rights are to be assumed).  I'm a bit disappointed that racing season for me won't resume until Masters events begin in the summer, but have decided on training for a marathon in the meanwhile.  Hopefully, I'll be able to increase my ability enough to feel comfortable entering next year's Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston.

I'm proud of all of the club's rowers work this semester and look forward to seeing some fast times from everyone in the spring.


Seahorse 0.9.6
2006-10-27T08:22:00.000-05:00
We kicked a new release of the Seahorse development branch out the door last night.  This is the first release with our Epiphany plugin and management of gnome-keyring passwords.  There were some usability fixes committed and several crashers fixed as well.   You can read the full release notes here and grab the source from CVS or GNOME FTP.  A Slackware package is already available in Dropline GNOME's 2.16.1 Pre-Release.


Good day Sir! I said Good Day!!
2006-10-11T21:01:00.000-05:00
Today was indeed a good day.  I confirmed results from code that computes radial and angular prolate spheroidal functions (fixing several bugs along the way) which moves me one step closer to performing computations. My new sculling oars from Concept II shipped today, a whole 12 days before the predicted ship date.  That's the kind of thing that makes me have warm fuzzy feelings about a company.  Never you mind that all oars ordered from them are custom made.


Food Science
2006-10-01T13:21:00.000-05:00
Yesterday and today have been spent in the kitchen. 

Yesterday I finally brewed up a batch of Raspberry Hefeweizen that I've been meaning to.  The partial boil went swimmingly and the yeast started actually started this time, but fermentation was a bit slow to start.  I can only assume I didn't get the temperature of the wort down to 70 degrees Fahrenheit quickly enough.  The airlock was cheerfully bubbling away this morning though and the out gas smells good, so I'm hopeful for a good batch of beer in the end.  I'll get around to posting pictures of my kegerator for homebrew at some point.

Today I decided to try my hand at pasta; specifically ravioli.  So far the pasta and the filling are made (so far so good).  I was going to serve them for dinner tonight, but a roommate asked me to switch dinner nights with him so they're on the menu for tomorrow night.  I'll probably finish making the ravioli sometime this afternoon.


Keg-a-who
2006-09-21T22:37:00.000-05:00
After much drama with the FedEx man, I have finally received the CO2 regulator that was holding up completion of the kegerator I've been not-so-secretly building on my porch.  I still require the ability to attach my second 5 gallon cornelius keg, but at the moment it's empty any way.  Hopefully in a few days I shall sample the fruits of my labor with a freshly carbonated glass of birch beer. Cheers!!


Epiphany Goodness
2006-09-17T15:21:00.000-05:00
Those of you paying attention to d-d-l would have noticed that Seahorse was proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.18 recently.  One of the concerns brought up was that it wasn't integrated enough and to that effect an Epiphany plugin should be created.

Such a plugin now exists!   Jean-François Rameau of #epiphany did the majority of the work by creating a framework for adding items to the context menu and handling mozembed calls to change the text in entry fields.  After struggling a bit with build magic and sprinkling with libcryptui and dbus calls I checked it in this afternoon.

More work needs to be done but it's usable.  Future work includes decrypting, verifying and signing the contents of text fields.  At the moment the plugin works with the additional comments field on b.g.o but doesn't handle the message body field on GMail.

I've created an Epiphany component under Seahorse on b.g.o.  Please file bugs there.


Welcome Seahorse Fans!
2006-08-17T18:31:00.000-05:00
As those of you paying attention to g-a-l have seen Seahorse had two releases today, 0.9.2 followed quickly by 0.9.2.1.  Even with that slight hiccup, today's been a good day for the project.  There were 17 CVS commits and 11 bugs were marked as fixed.  Thanks goes out to slomo and chpe in #gnome-hackers for their patch contributions! :)

The release announcements are here and here for 0.9.2 and 0.9.2.1 respectively.

Here's today's outrageous ChangeLog.


Gentle Giant
2006-07-31T15:10:00.000-05:00
I'm glad to see Luis using  Gentle Giant to move.   They support the olympic dreams of rowers by giving them jobs while they train and Giants have won more olympic medals than Ireland.


Gaim Plugin Update
2006-07-17T09:07:00.000-05:00
Since I've abandoned creating my own plugin and have been working with Bill Tompkins to add OpenPGP support to gaim-encryption there has been a good amount of progress.  All of the functions have been completed but I'm still chasing some nigling little bugs.  I've also been working to HIGify some more of g-e while I'm messing around with the internals.  I'll release some code when I can start encrypting back and forth.


T-Mobile Eats Babies
2006-07-17T08:41:00.000-05:00
Not really, but they have succeeded in making my trip to Albuquerque a real pain.  Their hot spots charge $9.99/day for internet access, roughly 1/4 the cost of my connection at home per month.  They only "provided" internet at two places I visited, but spent a substantial amount of time at.  The following details where internet was and wasn't available.

Greenville/Spartanburg Airport (GSP): Free internet.  Postage sized airport.
Dallas/Fort Worth Airport (DFW): T-Mobile Hotspot.  Enormous sized airport.
Albuquerque Sunport (ABQ): Free Internet. Provided by the city of Albuquerque, that's how you roll out the welcome mat.
Hyatt Regency Hotel: T-Mobile Hotspot.  This is a luxury hotel.  All said, I paid $US 174 per night for a triple occupancy room.  Every cheap hotel near the airport has free wifi, but the conference hotel for a conference of Electrical Engineers can't?  I think there should be a rule that if you don't give away internet access, you can't answer the question "Do you have wireless internet?" in the affirmative or use WIFI as a marketing term on your hotel's website.
Albuquerque Conference Center: Free internet in public areas where you could get away from people spamming the spectrum with Ad Hoc networks and Ad Hoc phishing schemes.
Just about every restaurant and cafe in Albuquerque: Free internet, not that I sacrificed conversation with friends and colleagues to surf.
Grand Canyon National Park: A glorious dead zone without cell phones.  You get one bar right up to the entrance of the park and then nothing.  I hope the National Forest Service makes this possible at many more of their parks.
Holiday Inn Express: Free internet with login.  Better than the Hyatt on this one.
The point being I'm a spoiled kid who likes his body permeated by 2.45 GHz waves providing free internet.


The rest of the conference ...
My presentation was last Tuesday morning in a session with the rest of the MURI group we work with.  The day before I attended a session with some gents from Sweden who were doing similar work testing GPS receivers against a wideband magnetron source (*drool* I use a heavily modified microwave oven).  They were pumping a maximum of 700 V/m from their source.  The oven was rated at 1300 W which gave me a maximum in the 10's of V/m.  Magnetron envy aside, my presentation went well.  I received a lot of positive feed back and collected some business cards as lovely parting gifts.  Wednesday a professor from JMU presented similar work performed by undergrads with a less heavily modified microwave oven than mine.  Bottom line: Beware your electronics are subject to testing by intentional EMI if you leave them lying around. :)


2006-07-08T17:13:00.000-05:00
Warp Whistle
Instead of implementing my own Gaim plug-in as I had planned, I've been concentrating on implementing a D-BUS based crypt protocol for the gaim-encryption plug-in.  I have 2 or 4 functions yet to implement then I'll put it through some testing before leaving for Albuquerque tomorrow.



Grocery Shopping the Way It Should Be
2006-06-25T16:45:00.000-05:00
Today I had one of the best grocery store experiences ever.  Food Lion has opened 2 new stores, called Bloom, in my area.  Today I visited their new Seneca store.  If you like self checkout, hold on to your hat!

Bloom's "bonus card" allows you to check out a handheld UPC scanner at the front of the store.  This scanner and a hanger of bags (available at the same location as the scanner) allow you to wander the store scanning your items and bagging them as you shop.  When you complete your shopping, at any of the self checkout kiosks you scan an end trip barcode, your "bonus card", your order is automagically loaded into the register and you then pay.  The techno-dweeb inside of me jumps for joy with the introduction of Bloom.  Also, who doesn't like wandering the aisles pretending to be a gun slinger with your scanner?

<Clint Eastwood>Do you like shopping? eh? Do ya punk?</Clint>

In the produce section, the scale prints a sticker ready to be scanned with the weight and price of your selection.  Discounts are tabulated directly on the scanner, where you can check prices, scan the list of items already in your cart, and see the total damage of your current trip.  I must report that very few people, if any, over the age of 30 appeared to be using the scanners and "traditional" checkout is available.  Given the looseness of scanning and checking out your own items, the ToS specifiy they will randomly spot check 1:10 carts and verify that some of the items in your cart are listed on your receipt.  I found this out in response to wondering about the lack of omnipresent CCTV cameras.

While overall the experience was positive, there are some "corporate practices" that unnerve me a little.  For instance the following was over heard on the PA system, "Attention All Associates, Cuddle Time in the Produce Section."  This was followed by several associates converging on the aforementioned section for what appeared like a cross between a staff meeting and an evangelical tent revivial complete with staff members cheering as data was reported by the managers.  Later in that same section, the "Chicken Dance" song was played.  I cannot report whether spontaneous dancing then occured.  At times the atomosphere seemed a bit too much touchy-feely for a grocery store.  I can only surmise that a focus group of "target shoppers" told Bloom they wanted to be close personal friends with their local grocery store employees.


Beep Beep Beep - Go ahead and dump it
2006-06-25T16:05:00.000-05:00
I've finally posted some the code so far for the Seahorse Gaim plugin as 2 Bugzilla attachments.  It doesn't do any thing terribly useful so far but hopefully will soon.


Off with his head
2006-06-21T09:16:00.000-05:00
P.G.O seems to have lost my hacker-gotchi.  Here it is again:




More tortoise than hare
2006-06-20T22:07:00.000-05:00
Slowly but surely I'm making progress on Seahorse's Gaim plugin.  At the moment it loads and has working preferences.  I fixed a memory corruption bug on loading and unloading the plugin multiple times.  It seems the plugin_destroy method was getting called instead of the plugin_unload method so a private structure wasn't being cleaned up properly.  Crisis averted.

I'll move on to adding the necessary UI to the conversation window next.  This might get delayed because instead of holding my prof's hand through MATLAB for our third paper at the upcoming APS/URSI International Symposium I'll be doing the interfacing from MATLAB to FORTRAN and back myself.  <deity> bless reusable code.


OpenPGP IM
2006-06-14T09:14:00.000-05:00
I'm finally getting around to implementing the fabled Seahorse plugin for Gaim. Things have moved far enough along that Seahorse now has an easy to use DBUS interface for handling keys(OpenPGP and SSH) and crypto operations as well as a separate library for providing consistant UI (libcryptui) across multiple applications that I can start without pulling our internal library (libseahorse) into the fray.

A year ago I touched base with Alan Humpherys of the Fire project to make sure that our implementations would be compatible.  He provided this handy dandy reference via the way back machine.  At the moment, very little is complete except for the build magic and plugin bits required by Gaim.  I have chronicled my thoughts so far on l.g.o.  I hope to make some progress between now and the second week of July when I will be attending the APS/URSI/AMEREM International Symposium.


Dear Lazy Web ....
2006-05-06T15:23:00.000-05:00
What's the "proper" way to request the network status from NetworkManager?  dus_g_proxy_*? nm-glib? Some combination of the two?


Novell and Clemson
2006-04-30T21:39:00.000-05:00
This week's Novell Open Audio Show is really good.  Not only is there a really good debunking of the sandal and pony tail set comment, there's some good news on the new Novell Client for Linux.  Because Clemson University is a large Novell install this is a big deal for Linux users on campus. 

The university is making some good strides in the use of Open Source.  The web servers have been running RH for years, but this past summer they employed the newly elected president of CLUG to develop a Ubuntu dual boot disk image for install on the mandated freshman laptops.

A belated congratulations to all of the new officers, especially Barend (He's succeeding me).


Seahorse Update
2006-04-03T20:23:00.000-05:00
Seahorse has recently aquired new Tangofied icons, including a new main icon.  Here they are:



Encryption Key Manager

Key Type Icons 


Encryption Applet

Clipboard Contents Icons 





The ability to add any GDK supported image format as a Photo ID on a OpenPGP key has landed, as well as, autoresizing Photo IDs that are too large. Checkout Seahorse HEAD for all the latest goodies!


Hackergotchi Received
2006-03-27T16:59:00.000-05:00
I received a really great head from Aaron 'abock' Bockover.
Karel 'scapor' Demeyer also submitted some excellent heads.  My thanks go out to both of you.


Hackergotchi Request
2006-03-27T14:22:00.000-05:00
I have a couple of source images if someone would be kind enough to make me a hackergotchi.  Thanks.


Go Forth and Popt No More!
2006-03-26T23:23:00.000-05:00
In the spirit of the GNOME Goals, I have created a patch to transition Seahorse to GOption.

This weekend was crazy with the rents and the twin visiting for Clemson Sprints. The races went well on Saturday with Clemson earning the Men's Points trophy for the second year in a row! The alumni party last night was wild as we were all drinking from our trophy.

LUG Pimpage: Next weekend CLUG is sponsoring TigerLAN, the biggest LAN party in the upstate of South Carolina. If you're in the area, admission is $10 until Wednesday night at midnight or $15 at the door.


Signing Blog Posts
2006-03-20T12:14:00.000-05:00
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Some people have been wondering why I've been GPG signing some of my blog posts. I'm attempting to demo the Encryption Applet present in Seahorse HEAD. It GPG encrypts, decrypts, signs, verifies and imports the contents of both the select/middle click and ctrl-c/v clipboards. It was created to provide some friends who use web mail an easy way to use GPG. The reason that some posts are signed and others aren't is because signing a text block strips fancy formatting and reinserting the formatting after signing the text destroys the validity of the signature.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3rc2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFEHuQdjU1oaHEI4wgRArhoAKDGueTVfiCTdVopMSRmWS/mmBG8+wCeNB/r
YMBg1eYcWT3Ch1VekqFNpVY=
=UIjJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


GnuPG Glossary
2006-03-20T11:57:00.000-05:00
This first installment of GnuPG Glossary comes straight from sunny Cocoa Beach, FL. There are two versions of the same term that always give me and sometimes other developers that work very closely with GPG considerable consternation. The term trust is often used to both describe believing a key to belong to who it says it does as well as believing that person to be capable of verifying other's identities properly.  More correctly, one should say that the key is valid and the owner is trusted for each of the respective concepts.  Here's a reference with an example of each.


Free at last Free at Last
2006-03-16T12:49:00.000-05:00
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

After the week from hell studying almost non-stop, I have successfully completed the two exams ghoulishly planned for the week before spring break. I am now officially finished with school for a solid week. I am off to Cocoa Beach, FL to row with the manatees and porpoises.

I also lucked out by finding out last night I didn't have to be in the driver's seat for 9 hours. If you don't hear from me, assume I've passed on to a much better place.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3rc2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFEGabqjU1oaHEI4wgRAg1GAJ4+45fhVKXoLnVgfBMqVJ5MMDFAGwCff7rw
eeEadphZhLEyue8JAuQ2Uew=
=dJKQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


New House and Exams
2006-03-15T11:12:00.000-05:00
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

My roommates and I signed a lease this morning for a farm house 15 minutes from campus. 4 bedrooms, 3 baths and high speed internet. What more could one ask for? The yard is enormous and I'll attempt to post pictures at some point. It's great to get that taken care of. We move in May 1st.

In the wind down into spring break, I have two big exams. One is this afternoon and the other is tomorrow morning. I've been studying nonstop for the past week and will officially be on break after tomorrow. *whew*
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3rc2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFEGD5VjU1oaHEI4wgRAjtsAKDUd37OYmCMJFM8U9vmoM3J6pJRKwCfSF+a
pvB1mONTHzT290L9bUHueRw=
=TbGJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


Fight in the Dog: NCAA Championships for Men Must Die!
2006-03-12T23:20:00.000-05:00
Fight in the Dog: NCAA Championships for Men Must Die!

Even though this blog focuses on LWT women, who definitely deserve more than the two sentences recently written in Rowing News, as a LWT man I must agree.  I think the NCAA has hurt women's rowing as much as Title IX has helped it.  I'd hate to see men's rowing share the same fate.


Patches Patches Everywhere
2006-03-09T23:27:00.000-05:00
Reworked a patch for respecting proxy preferences. Wrote a patch to allow the cache reminder in the notification area to be disabled.

I also received my new WinTech 1x today.  I had a great row and many more are expected. : )  I'll make an attempt to post pictures later.


You can't foo everyone all the time
2006-03-08T22:08:00.000-05:00
I made a couple of quick changes to window icons in seahorse-daemon and seahorse-applet.  The about dialog now displays the snazzy new icon Nate whipped up.



I posted a patch so that our HKP key fetching respects the GNOME proxy.  Hopefully, I'll find some time to create a patch to hide the passphrase cache icon in the notification area soon.

If this post finds it's way to p.g.o, hello to everyone!


Seahorse Development Release
2006-03-07T14:59:00.000-05:00
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hot on the heels of 0.8.1 is our first development release 0.9.0. This is from HEAD in cvs, soon to be svn. Here are the highlights from the release notes:

* Major Changes between 0.8 and 0.9:
=====================================

* Simple management of SSH keys
* Panel applet for clipboard encryption [Adam Schreiber]
* Better HIG in dialogs [chpe, Jim Pharis]
* Display keys and key properties in a simpler manner.
* Uses libnotify to display signature notifications.
* Key sharing on local network via DNS-SD
* Better help documentation [Adam Schreiber]
* Display photo IDs on OpenPGP keys [Adam Schreiber]
* Tons of other smaller UI enhancements and bug fixes

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/seahorse/0.9/seahorse-0.9.0.tar.gz
[MD5 sum: 43f84868090b1c41d82ef8d5e9165481]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3rc1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFEDfMGjU1oaHEI4wgRAiHmAKDBTEZ4BDHaAE/GuIszknr8RcMwrACgxTt+
JNMSTyjH613XryqLny3ptXo=
=+hEK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


New Stable Seahorse Release
2006-03-05T21:33:00.000-05:00
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Seahorse 0.8.1 Has just been released with some fixes and updated/new
translations. 0.9.0 can't be long now, so get ready to be blown away by
the changes between the two. The release notes follow.

- ----------------------------------------------------------

A stable release

* About Seahorse:
==================

Seahorse is a GNOME application for managing PGP keys. It also
integrates with nautilus, gedit and other places for encryption,
decryption and other operations. Seahorse is based on GPG and GPGME.

This release implements most 'PGP type' functionality and should be
useful for anyone familiar with OpenPGP.

Current work on seahorse is going into making encryption easier for end
users to use and (where needed) comprehend. The 0.9.x releases will
reflect this.

* Changes between 0.8 and 0.8.1:
=================================

* Better HKP support for strange key servers.
* Updated gedit plugin to work with gedit 2.14
* Fixed signing of keys with GPG 1.4.2 [Daniel Rodriguez Garcia]
* Fixed some minor packaging and build problems.
* Many smaller bug fixes.

Updated Translations:
======================

* Alexander Shopov (bg)
* Miloslav Trmac (cs)
* Manual Borchers (de)
* Adam Weinberger (en_CA)
* Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es)
* Ilkka Tuohela (fi)
* Gabor Kelemen (hu)
* Takeshi AIHANA (ja)
* Tino Meinen (nl)

Downloads:
===========

Source code:
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/seahorse/0.8/seahorse-0.8.1.tar.gz
[MD5 sum: 1f16678e465f20758aff293676e7e291]

Seahorse 0.8.1 requires GPGME 1.0 or later and GPG 1.2.x or 1.4.x:
http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/download/index.html

Notes:
=======

* The website and other online resources haven't been updated to
reflect the new release. This will occur shortly.
* Bug reports are appreciated should be filed in the GNOME Bugzilla.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3rc1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFEC5+tjU1oaHEI4wgRArSHAKCA7FNRjvOC7Vp0RJllHqurWm998gCg5CQp
mvZEDmJ4PgUJ5lypDU1S/tI=
=Bskp
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Encryption Key Manager
Key Type Icons
Encryption Applet
Clipboard Contents Icons