Welcome Seahorse Fans!

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

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

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

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. :)

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

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

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

P.G.O seems to have lost my hacker-gotchi. Here it is again:

More tortoise than hare

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

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 ....

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

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

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

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

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!

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

-----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

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

-----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.
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.3rc2 (GNU/Linux)

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

New House and Exams

-----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*
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.3rc2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFEGD5VjU1oaHEI4wgRAjtsAKDUd37OYmCMJFM8U9vmoM3J6pJRKwCfSF+a
pvB1mONTHzT290L9bUHueRw=
=TbGJ
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