Vrrrroooom

I passed my motorcycle driving test yesterday. w007!

Signingparty - Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ......

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!

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

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

I spoke too soon as this signed email does not verify correctly. Google why can't we get this right?

GMail part deux

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

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.