Advogato blog for dyork

28 Jul 2004

Wed, 28 Jul 2004 10:45:05 GMT

Continuing to post mainly to my LiveJournal account. I really like the offline editor, Semagic, that I have been using... and the comment facility is also very nice.

I have found I have actually been posting more frequently there, i.e. multiple times per day. In large part because I know many people read it through RSS aggregators, but also because there isn't something like recentlog that is read by many people. Given that only one entry by one user shows up in recentlog, I tended to write long entries here at Advogato with many topics. Now, with the bulk of people (that I know of) reading my LiveJournal through RSS, the incentive is actually the other way to write small, short, single-topic entries.

Given that there is also a RSS feed for this diary, it would make sense to change to that style of writing here as well. (Of course, only the latest entry would show up in recentlog.)

Still haven't decided if I am going to formally end my writing here, but I am certainly moving in that direction.

5 Jul 2004

Mon, 5 Jul 2004 13:58:14 GMT

Moving to LiveJournal? - I am very grateful to raph that he was able to bring this site back up.... but in the intervening 5-6 weeks that it has been down, I have actually started to write over at my LiveJournal account.

I honestly haven't decided yet whether I will continue writing there or resume writing here. Much to think about and with definite pros and cons on both sides.

Stay tuned for my decision... if you don't see much writing here, you may want to look at my account there.

Offline writers to post to LiveJournal and Advogato? - One possible solution I have considered is to post the text to both.... and I've been wondering about whether there was an offline writer that could work with both LJ and Advo. I've been using Semagic for writing at LJ and have found it to be very useful. If such a tool could work and post to both sites it would be very interesting indeed. (Perhaps Semagic already does... need to investigate.)

Anyway, if you do know of such a program, please do e-mail me. (Thanks!)

27 May 2004

Thu, 27 May 2004 03:29:04 GMT

A Dream Finally Dies - Found out today that Linuxcare finally entered the history books. As noted on the About Us page, they are now Levanta, as detailed in this news release as well as this LinuxWorld story.

And so ends a final chapter in the long-running saga known as Linuxcare. Sad to see in so many ways, but appropriate given that the company today is completely different from how it began.

I will forever be grateful to Art Tyde, Dave Sifry, David Laduke and David Mandala (davidm) for the chance they gave me to be employed by Linuxcare and yet be funded to launch LPI. Those were crazy days back then in 1999 and 2000 as Linuxcare rode the dot-com wave.... an amazing time that will probably not be repeated for many years.

Goodbye, Linuxcare... you launched so many projects and did help reinforce to the corporate world that yes, you could get technical support for Linux!

IronPython - Interesting.

The Chloe Journals: The case of the missing 3 - In the past week or two, the number "3" has gone missing from our life. Up until that time, the wee one was counting "1, 2, 3, 4, 5"... and now, suddenly, everything is "1, 2, 4, 5"... it's cute on one level... I mean, she's only two... I'm sure that soon enough that darn 3 will re-enter our world. :-)

11 May 2004

Tue, 11 May 2004 01:30:33 GMT

A year in the life of Fedora - I found this message both entertaining and sad. The entertaining aspect was certainly that someone would take the time to write it all up in IRC format!

Why Encrypted E-mail Doesn't Work - Wound up reading this article on encrypted e-mail. While I dispute the author's assertion that S/MIME is the defacto standard for encrypted e-mail (I would argue there isn't one - and would also say that I get more people trying to use PGP to encrypt e-mail to me than I ever have for S/MIME), I do not disagree with his central thesis. Put simply, it is this:

More people don't use encrypted e-mail because the e-mail clients are miserable with regard to encryption.

Absolutely! I look right now at some people I know that would like to know more about using PGP-encrypted e-mail. Unfortunately, the e-mail client they use, Lotus Notes, does not have an easy way to support PGP. The workaround I show them involves writing your text, highlighting it, copying it to the clipboard, triggering WinPT to encrypt the contents, and then pasting it back into the Notes memo. (You should just be able to highlight the text and let WinPT do its thing, but Notes seems to do something funky with the window focus that disallows this.) It is not something for the casual user.

In contrast, of course, there is good old mutt, or the new Mozilla Thunderbird client with Enigmail installed. I use the latter for my home account and it works like a dream. Whenever I get a PGP-signed message, it automagically checks the sig. When I want to encrypt or decrypt, it is just simple button presses. Works beautifully...

But until everyone else has a mail client that works that well, encrypted e-mail just will not have widespread adoption.

S/MIME - I should clarify, though, that having a mail client that supports encryption is only half the battle. Many people point out that Outlook and Outlook Express do support encryption... the only thing is that it is S/MIME. And so the second half of the issue is being able to successfully configure the encryption support. As Jon Udell points out in his article on identity and S/MIME configuring your mail client to support S/MIME is not exactly easy. And how many people have actually gone and obtained a free personal certificate from Thawte?

Yes, I am a Network Geek - Lest there be any doubt, my current hotel setup out here at N+I will conclusively validate that statement. First of all, I have a Linksys wireless router connected to the high-speed Internet port.

Connected into that router, I have a Mitel phone connected back to our Teleworker server in Ottawa, giving me secure VoIP over the Internet back to the corporate office. Yes, this is one of my products, so I am admittedly biased, but, not being a "phone guy", this thing still blows me away whenever I use it. I mean, think about what it is doing... I have a 4-digit extension off of our phone switch back in Ottawa. I can punch in anyone's extension and talk to them (and them to me). I can push 9 and dial any local Ottawa numbers, such as dialling home to check messages - or calling Lori's cell phone. And all of that with secure encryption - and with voice quality that is really like I'm right there at the office (i.e. way better than cellular!). And it's doing this all over the Internet! This is where VoIP starts to be VERY cool.

Also connected to that router, of course, is my laptop via wireless. I have a nice hotel room with a patio looking out into the desert. The room is a mini-suite as well, and so now I can sit wherever I want, including out on the patio and browse the web. Cool stuff.

Of course the wireless is locked down. The router supports WPA, but I think I have to upgrade my laptop, so in the meantime I'm using 128-bit WEP with a strong passphrase and, more importantly, I'm restricting connections to only the MAC address of my wireless card. I've also disabled SSID broadcast.... doing all I can to lock it down. I'm here at a conference with a load of other network and security folks - you can't tell me no one will be scanning for WiFi networks.

A Promotion You Probably Won't See in Wal-Mart - Driving across New Hampshire on the weekend I saw this sign "Free chainsaw with purchase of a new tractor." Funny thing is, I bet the promotion works.

First they give us cold food, then they make us pay - Amazing to see the continued decline of food service on board commercial airplanes in the U.S. Years ago, of course, we had nice hot meals served to us... lasagna or chicken or beef or eggs or whatever... along with overdone vegetables or rice, etc. I don't recall it ever being overly good, but it was at least hot and had some nutritional substance. It was ever served on little trays with... gasp... real silverware.

That was one of the first casualties. The "cutlery" became the plastic type prepacked in a little bag. But then the hot meals went away, too. Replaced by cold sandwiches.... or bagels or rolls. Soon it was just a little "box meal" with a very prepackaged sandwich no doubt chock full of preservatives, trans-fats and all that. Served with some time of sugary snack made by some large corporation.

For a while, then, it seemed that all they would give you on flights was bags of pretzels. (Peanuts went away due to allergies, although not being a peanut fan, this change was perfectly fine with me.)

And now, the final insult. I noticed on my US Air ticket that it said "Food available for purchase" and indeed it was. That same lousy box lunch was now available for "only $7"! And a meal of a chicken club sandwich was available for $10. That seemed to come in a box from the restaurant T.G.I.Fridays who probably wound up paying the airline for the ability to provide those meals.

Yet, in all of these years, I haven't really seen a tremendous decline in the airfare I pay. Yes, on certain routes it has. But on other routes it is the same or more. I know that fuel costs have increased, as has labor, etc.... all in a post 9/11 world when in theory fewer people are travelling. Still, it is indeed sad to see the decline.

5 May 2004

Wed, 5 May 2004 01:09:39 GMT

--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.

26 Apr 2004

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 13:45:28 GMT

PGP/GnuPG Keysigning at Networld+Interop in Las Vegas? - I created an event entry at biglumber to see if there is any interest from others in having a PGP/GnuPG keysigning during Networld+Interop in Las Vegas from May 11-13. If there is interest, I would certainly be open to helping set one up... I think I'll reach out to some of the LUGs there to see if there is any interest.

If any of you are going to N+I and would like to participate, please e-mail me or add your key to the keyring.

Geek Test - 38.06706% - Major Geek

Journey Through The Land of Abandoned Dreams - As we travelled along Route 11 in rural upstate New York... parallel to the Canadian border... I couldn't help but think of all the dreams lying in tatters on the side of that road. There on the left is a huge barn tilting to the side with boards missing and hay still visible in the opening where the doors used to be. There on the right a dilapidated house that looks to have been vacant for many years. Over there what looks to be the remains of what must have been a fairly big farm operation. There a barn mostly falling down and farm machinery lying all around in varying states of decay, while someone lives in a aging trailer in front with multiple junk cars around it. And all along the rock walls now falling down and in some places long overgrown.

You can see these sights all along route 11 from about Malone over to near Lake Champlain and the Vermont border. I just wonder... what are the stories here? What made people abandon their dreams?

Did the farms die because of the usual reasons... inability to compete with mega-corporate farms of today? Lack of interest by a younger generation in continuing the farm? Death or disease of the principals? Inability to find buyers?

Or were there other reasons? There are so many sites along this stretch of Route 11, it just does cause one to wonder. What stories those old beams could tell....

21 Apr 2004

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 20:02:02 GMT

Security Fun - Having fun with this NISCC advisory this week... answering people's questions and continuing investigation on our end.

Wikipedia and Mitel - Found through a strange series of links that a colleague at work had created a Wikipedia page on Mitel. Interesting to see it.

Eldred Act - A brief wander through cyberspace brought me to eldred.cc, dedicated to expanding the amount of information available in the public domain. Very interesting site.

New German LPI Book - Learned that a new book will be released in Germany this week that will cover the LPI Level 1 exams. Good to see.

Gewürztraminer Riesling - Spent the weekend with some friends in the Niagra region and visited some wonderful vineyards. Found a wonderful 2002 Gewürztraminer Riesling from the Pillitteri Estates Winery. It is truly an amazing tasting wine. (If you enjoy pleasant white wines, their sales agents are here.) It was a great day just touring around the Niagra-on-the-Lake region and sampling wines from some of the many vineyards.

16 Apr 2004

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:55:47 GMT

RWL - My Preso - My talk at Real World Linux went quite well yesterday. About 25 people or so, which for this conference, was a very well-attended session. Of course, I wasn't sure what to think when I had 3 friends walk right in sit in the very front row. When you are talking about "Linux for Windows administrators" and you have John "maddog" Hall and John Terpstra (of Samba fame) sitting right there in front of you, it could give one pause. I actually enjoyed it because I could play off of them and they had some good items to add to the discussion. Quite fun!

It was entertaining, too, to be asked to sign copies of the Linux book I co-authored with Mark Minasi. The publisher, Sybex, had very nicely provided copies that I could give away to the first 35 people who attended... which meant that everyone received a copy!

As always, I enjoyed watching people's eyes light up... I enjoyed answering their questions and seeing the comprehension dawn. The silent expression of "oh, so that is how I can do it" or "you mean I could do that?" or "is it really that simple?"

It's funny, but no matter what else I do, I come back to being most alive when I am standing in front of people de-mystifying technologies and making it come alive for them. At my heart, I will always be an educator.

RWL - You Can Understand Why Microsoft Is Scared - I don't usually attend conference keynotes, because often I have found them somewhat, um, "content-free". But for whatever reason, I found myself sitting down in the morning keynote by Ed Kilroy, president of IBM Canada.

And as I sat there listening, I found myself thinking "You can understand why Microsoft is scared of Linux." Here is a president of IBM addressing a crowd of several hundred people and explaining their commitment to Linux. IBM's own usage of Linux is very impressive, with literally thousands of internal production servers running mission-critical applications on Linux. And their $1 billion commitment to Linux... and the 7,000+ employees they have focused on Linux...

But go back again to the fact that this was the president of a major IBM division, whose keynote was following those given the previous day by senior executives of Novell and HP. Pretty darn impressive for a little operating system that has emerged as such a major player. And pretty darn scary for a company such as Microsoft.

RWL - Dinners With Friends... and... How Far LPI Has Come - It was wonderful to have dinner twice with Wilma Silbermann from LPI, as well as to be joined in one of those dinners by maddog and John Terpstra. Wonderful people sharing fun stories and friendship. I remember well when we first hired Wilma all those many years ago at LinuxWorld in New York in, I think, 2001. What a long, long way LPI has come since then! Amazing to see...

OLS Preso - Received the good news that my proposal was accepted for a tutorial at the Ottawa Linux Symposium focused on using GnuPG and the Web of Trust. It should be fun as I have some great ideas about how to help people get started quickly.

Open Source Vulnerability Database - Was referred to this site today and was surprised to learn of it. Didn't know about it.... interested to learn more.

The Chloe Journals - The wee one turned two on Wednesday... what an amazing two years this has been

9 Apr 2004

Fri, 9 Apr 2004 02:17:35 GMT

LinTraining - Received an interesting submission to LinTraining today in the form of a book in German. We don't actually receive that many book entries and so that list is rather small. It was therefore a bit surprising to get a book submission, since it had been so long since I had seen one.

Port Knocking - Found this article and this site to be interesting to learn more about the whole concept of "port knocking". Interesting stuff.

FBI Petition to the FCC - This Register article is an interesting summary of the issues around the FBI petition to the FCC with regard to being able to wiretap Voice-over-IP communications. It will be interesting to see what impact this has on our (telecommunications) industry, as all of us are going to VoIP.

Forrester Report - mjcox: Thank you for the link to your joint response to the Forrester report. I agree that Forrester unfairly tainted OSS software.

Canadiana - Zee or Zed - So we bought Chloe a little Leapfrog "Alphabet Pal" toy, forgetting, of course, that we are in Canada..... so as you go through the alphabet, it ends "eks, why, zed". Not "zee", but "zed". Ah, the fun of the Queen's English versus that with which we have grown up.

The Chloe Journals - Moments of Beauty - Last night after dinner we went for a walk down along the Ottawa River Parkway bike path. Chloe, of course, being an independent two-year-old, will no longer hold your hand or finger but instead walks separately along carrying her little purse and laughing in glee. And then Lori was walking ahead and hiding behind a tree... and Chloe would run up and "find" her. As the sequence was repeated, the world receded around me. For a moment in time, there was perfect clarity and joy. All the problems of the day, all the challenges of work, all the other stresses in life.... all of that slipped away in a beautiful evening walk... as the wee one ran from tree to tree... for just that moment, everything stopped... and the world coalesced into one perfect moment of beauty.

5 Apr 2004

Mon, 5 Apr 2004 00:37:46 GMT

Small Caps - Making The World Less Ugly - markonen: I don't think that haruspex was necessarily saying this was my problem, but I agree with you that it isn't. The issue is with the browser manufacturers who have not correctly implemented the CSS attribute:

  style="font-variant: small-caps"

when that attribute is added to a tag such as, in my case, the <b> tag.

Now, having said that, I as an author/designer have to decide whether or not I want to continue to use this CSS attribute knowing that it does indeed look ugly in some browsers (well, so far mostly Safari on MacOS 10.3). Which is more important to me? The look of small caps in my headings? Or having pages that are not ugly?

I think for the moment I will actually choose to make the world less ugly and just shift back to how I used to do my headings without small caps. And... I'm going to try to file a bug with Apple about Safari's rendering of small caps. Even though the percentage of people seeing my page with Safari on MacOS 10.3 is probably comparatively small, it *is* ugly in Safari.... there's no other way to describe it.

haruspex: Thanks for the interesting pointer to the Yale typefaces. I always like seeing when people have put some real thought into the design of their typefaces.

Thanks, too, for this whole conversation around small caps... I very much enjoyed it.

Winter's Last Gasp - So I wake up this morning, April 4th, to see heavy snow falling down! Now, it will not last. It will melt in the next day or two, but still.... just as the yard was finally clear of it all and just as you could see the lillies starting to break out of the ground... just when Spring seems to be all around... we get one last snowfall...

The Correct Way to Set the Table - In case any of you happen to be wondering, here it is.