14 Oct 2005
I spent fifteen minutes figuring the whole GPG thing out today, and, I have to say, it makes lots more sense once you’ve attempted it once. This article from LUG@GT in particular is perhaps the most straightforward piece I’ve ever read on this matter, but that’s dually a comment on the literary capabilities of the F/OSS community as a whole, yet simultaneously an endorsement of the article itself.
The one thing I still don’t quite get is how a message — speaking of emails, here — can be considered as “authentic” as a result of its GPG signature. The signature varies based on the content of the message, and somehow this signature can be considered authentic. Published or not, I still struggle to see how a message can be authoratively considered authentic or otherwise based on a public authentication method seemingly in a state of flux. Perhaps the message content when compared against the key yields the email address and name, against which the message is compared?
If so, in the page linked to above there is (another link to) a full public key not represented in the email message that is supposedly authenticated… not even in its abbreviated hex form (or whatever the heck (hex? :p) 0x426B3C19 is meant to represent — that’s my public key, by the way.)
Anyone who knows how this stuff works got a better/clearer explanation for me? I can understand or at least interact with the encryption side of things without difficulty… I just struggle to see how this signature can be in any way meaningful, when it changes whilst supposedly representing some constant. I’ve proposed a possibility in this post, of course, but I can’t prove it… maybe that’s what the Comment field GPG offers is for? Skeptics like me?
13 Oct 2005
One of several shots from a series of photos I took recently. Comment and post your cheesy titles if you’re that way inclined! “Soar”, obviously, is a little too cliché… can we do better? Hehehe.
For more, see the newly resurrected gallery. Click the image above for (compressed) source resolution. Uncompressed source and full resolution versions of all images in the gallery are sitting on my computer… I’d say to get in touch if you want to use them for anything, but then, I still haven’t bothered to fix my contact form yet. Well, leave a comment and I’ll get in touch ;-) And I’ll fix the contact form soon, promise.
13 Oct 2005
I mean, they really employ geeks. One of their IE staffers, Dave Massy, had a baby (well, I presume his significant other did) and posted about it amidst announcing the release of the IE Developers toolbar. Notably, the baby reference was fleetingly thrown in there whilst, of course, the focus was on the birth of the toolbar!
Yeah yeah, I know, it’s an MSDN blog not a personal one, but still. Struck me as a little… odd. You’ve just had a baby! Be excited about that, not a piece of software! ;-)
12 Oct 2005
Just finished hacking together bits of the rejuvenated gallery. I’ve ditched Photostack, finally, because it had a few too many quirks and also because I nagged Ben enough to get all the features it had into cat-scan. Resultingly, it’s now powered by that.
Permalinks will still work thanks to .htaccess magic, but feeds won’t (yet). The only new content up there is a Godspell photo album from earlier this year that I didn’t get to scan until a month or two ago.
More to come soon (including working RSS and Atom feeds), but I need to get to bed, so not tonight. Enjoy.
12 Oct 2005
Note to self:
It might be worth considering doing something about this blog’s appearance in IE, in light of traffic from that creeping towards the 60% mark.
“It is the masses, the majority–this infernal compact majority–that poisons the sources of our moral life and infects the ground we stand on.”
– Dr Stockmann, An Enemy of the People, IV
Or, you know, this infernal compact majority that, by their choice of browser, poisons our CSS with hacks and conditionally-commented stylesheets. Or alternatively, our markup… the ground the web stands on.
