--refresh-keys - 1945 new signatures across 215 keys... guess I haven't refreshed in a while.

Keysigning at Networld+Interop in Las Vegas - Have had no interest in my posting about a keysigning at N+I in Las Vegas. Too bad, as it would be interesting to connect with other PGP/GPG folks there.

N+I - Speaking of N+I, if any of you will be there next week, do drop a line as it is always interesting to meet Advo folks face-to-face. For the first time in ages, I'm attending a show as an attendee rather than as a booth worker. Looking forward to it.

Although... we needed someone to go to Berlin next week to meet with one of our partners, and, since the product is in my portfolio, I would be the logical choice. However, with non-refundable travel and fees already paid for me to N+I, someone else is going. Gee, as a German-speaker, would I rather go to Berlin or Las Vegas? It's not even close... I actually can't stand Las Vegas. For all of you who only know Las Vegas through the TV show CSI, let me just tell you that it is highly overrated.

Massive WoT movement - what big keysigning happened in April? - Just for grins I checked the latest keyanalyze reports to see if I happened to still be listed in the top 1000. Now I hadn't looked in a good number of months so I had no idea. I found that I was there at #725, which was a drop of several hundred from where I used to be.

So of course I had to investigate. Weird thing is that in the April 4 report I was still at 528, yet two weeks later in the April 18 report I was down at 727. And a friend who had been a number of spots above me dropped completely off the chart?

What caused such movement in two weeks? It just seems strange. Now, I wasn't really paying attention... was there some big keysigning somewhere in the world in the first week of April? I know after OLS last year there was a big fluctuation in the WoT stats.

Or is the difference in the number of keys being analyzed? In the 4/4 status there were 214,143 keys imported, with 73,024 being reachable and 2,5012 in the strong set (scroll to the bottom to see this). And the set was built with 413,740 signatures.

Two weeks later the 4/18 status shows 142892 keys imported, with 72073 reachable and 23,166 in the strong set. 376659 signatures were used.

What caused the disappearance of over 71,000 keys? And why did the strong set drop by 1800+ keys?

[The answer] - Ah, the truth is out there in a mailing list. As of April 18th, new versions of the key analysis and signature-checking software were being used. Others noticed the discrepancy as well, and it turns out to be related to expiration of self-signatures. Further discussion brought out this interesting (to me) post about some of how the WoT statistics are generated.

USENIX Board and Microsoft - Does anyone else enjoy the irony of having someone from Microsoft Research as the new President of the Board of USENIX? I mean, Mike Jones has been involved in USENIX for quite a while, and USENIX has left its UNIX roots to a degree and focused more on system administration in general. Still, it's just a sign of how far things have come...

MCSE - Was amused last week to find out that I still am a Microsoft Certified System Engineer. I became an MCSE back in 1996 or 1997 on NT 4 and never upgraded when Windows 2000 came out. There was the big uproar over the fact that MS was cancelling your certification if you didn't upgrade it to Win2K and last I heard all of us with NT4 MCSEs were no longer MCSEs as of last December or something like that. I had also heard that Microsoft had reversed its position.

Living in the land of Linux, I hadn't really paid any attention to it at all. But after my talk on Linux-Windows integration at Real World Linux earlier this month, I decided to check into it. Lo and behold, they did reverse their position and I am still an MCSE. Fun, fun, fun...

Ghostsites - Enjoyed this site "Where Dead Web Sites Live On...". Quite entertaining to see as it chronicles the excesses of the dot-com age.

April 30 - Poem In Your Pocket Day - I like this idea to celebrate National Poetry Month.