Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

I was helping Wendee fix up her blog’s theme, this evening, and decided it was time to explore a new look for my own blog. It’s been a couple of years since I last muddied the waters, so I figured tonight was as good a time as any.

The photograph at the top of the page is an old covered bridge that we found, one day, while we were exploring the area around Peninsula, Ohio, where we used to live. The countryside was so beautiful that we would frequently go on hikes through the woods, and this was one of those days.

I’m not sure the color palette is exactly the way I want it, yet, so don’t be surprised if it changes just a bit. If you have any suggestions, feel free to offer those as well!

I’ve attached a zip file, containing this theme, to this post so feel free to try it out on your own blog!

Once you’ve recognized the importance of encrypting your Internet communications, the next step, of course, is to figure out how you plan to do this.

As with anything you intend to incorporate into your daily lifestyle, it’s important that you make a few key decisions up front, before you’re too committed to a particular approach. It’s also quite important that you find a relatively painless way to implement your plan: if it takes too much manual work, you’re not likely to do it all the time.

You Can’t Do It Alone

Encryption is about communication, and communication implies at least two parties. Whichever approach you settle upon for your day-to-day encryption, you will have to consider those with whom you will be communicating the most. This means you’ll want to select a technology that most of your friends and family will have readily available to them, as well. For example, if you wish to communicate with me, you will want to select an OpenPGP compatible solution, as I primarily use PGP Desktop Home for my regular correspondence.

X.509 Certificates

The easiest solution, though also the most expensive, is to purchase a client certificate from a trusted certificate authority, and install it into your favorite email client. There are a handful of certificate authorities which issue free certificates (albeit with no personally identifying information), but most of these are untrusted by the major operating systems. I’m aware of only one free certificate that is trusted by all the major operating systems, www.startssl.com.

As a software developer, I have used digital certificates in quite a few of my corporate software solutions, but I prefer to avoid the hassle and expense of paying for my certificates every year, for my personal use.

OpenPGP Keys

Back in 1991, Phil Zimmermann created the first “Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP) program, to enable political activists to secure their online communications. He released the source code into the public domain, because he felt that encryption technology was something that average people should have access to, not just corporate and government developers.

This is the approach I have settled on, for my own personal correspondence. While the technology is often a little bit more finicky to get working, because it’s mostly open source software, it’s the most popular protocol amongst non-governmental types, and there are quite a few innovative solutions based on it (such as encrypting instant messaging conversations and VOIP telephone calls).

My Current Implementation

At the moment, I am using Microsoft Outlook 2010 Beta 2, as my primary email client, and PGP Desktop Home v9.10.

I won’t go through a step-by-step installation guide, as whatever software you select will already have such. In my case, PGP Desktop was an ideal solution because, though it cost me $99 to purchase a license, it uses a client-agnostic proxy that filters my incoming and outgoing email traffic. It also intercepts AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) traffic and encrypts it, as well!

If you are using Outlook 2003 or 2007, there is an open source plugin called GpgOl that is available, as part of an overall Windows-oriented package of GPG (open source version of PGP) tools called Gpg4Win. As of today, I have been unable to get GpgOl to work in Outlook 2010, though I’ve seen a few comments on the support forum by folks who claim to have made it work. I’m thinking, maybe, they had it installed before they upgraded Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2010.

While I was investigating software implementations of PGP for Windows, I also came across a product called cGeep that looked very promising. It also uses the Outlook plugin approach, though, so I decided to go ahead and pay a little more to get PGP’s proxy, so I could know it will work with the cutting edge, beta software that I often run.

What Are You Waiting For?

If you value your privacy and individual liberties at all, I strongly encourage you to invest an hour or two setting up an encryption system on your computer. If you need any technical assistance, I can’t promise to be an expert, but I’d be happy to assist however I can.

This is one of those funny, little emails that have been circulating around the Internet for years… I tried to track down its origins, but gave up when it became quite obvious to me that nobody would be pressing charges for violating a copyright! The only changes I’ve made have been to clean up a few typos, here and there, that were just bothering me!

To The Spoiled Under-30 Crowd!

If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning….

Uphill… barefoot… BOTH ways

Yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But now that I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a darn Utopia!

And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter, with a pen!

Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take a week to get there!  Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us.  As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our tails!  No where was safe!

There were no MP3’s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up!

There were no CD players!  We had tape decks in our car.  We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished, and the tape would come undone.

We didn’t have fancy crap like call waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal; that’s it!

And we didn’t have fancy caller ID either: when the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, or a collections agent; you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600, with games like “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids”! Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!

And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your tail and walk over to the TV to change the channel! There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I’m saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rats!

And we didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove… Imagine that!

That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled. You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or before!

Regards,

The Over 30 Crowd

 

Here’s a handy-dandy way to listen to music online. It actually searches the web to find the music you want to hear (so, if your search results include YouTube, for instance, you’ll get video along with your music!)

StreamDrag – hear your favorite music.

Still have questions about the upcoming switch to digital TV? Here’s a quick video to answer all your questions!

OK, after I got all excited about Firefox 3 coming at the end of the month, I noticed Benjamin Golub posted a link over on FriendFeed, that says the Firefox team is hoping to release it on the 17th.

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavor to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready“. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.

That’s even better news! Hopefully, they’ll pull it off…

Ever since Internet Explorer 7.0 came out, I’ve been a huge fan of Firefox! Of course, those of you who actually know me, know that I have a long history with Microsoft products, and I’ve been accused of being biased… though, as much as it’s possible to be objective, I genuinely think I do give a fair chance to a wide variety of technologies.

Granted, I just used Internet Explorer for most of my life on the web, but really that was more about the fact that I prefer to keep my core technology stack simple: stick with a single vendor as much as possible, to remove the inevitable conflicts and hassles that arise from too many cooks in the pot, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m digressing from my intended point, here. After IE 7 was released, I really tried to use it as my primary browser. I tried really, really hard to ignore the huge number of annoyances… as a software developer, I also prefer to keep my operating system configured the way most of my users will have it, so I learned to live with the new User Account Control (UAC) features of Windows Vista, that forever ask you if you’d like to grant permission to do this or that. Well, the combination of UAC and the obsessively over-strict security features of IE 7 just made my day-to-day life on the web unbearable!

So, I downloaded Firefox and started using that. Now, I can keep all of my open sites in a single browser instance, regardless of the “security zone”. There is a practically infinite number of extensions and add-ons that let me conform the browser to “my way” of doing things. The only reason I ever launch Internet Explorer, these days, is to log into my company’s web-based VPN that is also obsessively over-strict, and won’t work right with Firefox!

Since about Beta 4, I’ve been running Firefox 3. It’s been great, albeit missing a few add-ons. Well, it does crash quite a bit… but, I’m rather used to that, having spent the last ten years or so, using nothing but Internet Explorer!

Like anyone else who loves Firefox, as I have grown to, I am really looking forward to the final release of Firefox 3.0, but the Firefox team has been pretty quiet about the exact date they anticipate releasing. They’re requesting pledges from people to download their copy of Firefox 3 on the very day it releases, so they can set a world record for the highest number of downloads in a single day! Yet, they still won’t say just what day that will be…

Well, it seems they might have let the release date known to some key partners, perhaps, because I discovered this website tonight (thanks to Danny on Lockergnome for pointing it out):

Is June 27th the right date? I don’t know, but it gives us something to count down to, at least!

Years ago, when Google first deployed their “Notebooks” service, I played with it and dismissed it. It just wasn’t easy enough to be particularly useful to me.

Well, I opened it up again, today, and discovered they’ve really improved the workflow in using it! It’s actually quite handy for stashing the little snippets of information I find around the web, that I think will be useful to myself and my friends.

So, if you’re interested in seeing the sorts of information I’m saving to my notebooks, I have shared them to the public on this page. In fact, you can even subscribe to an RSS feed of them, if you cared to!

Thanks to Congressman John Culberson, I watched live video from the control room, unpolished by NASA and up close and personal!

Here’s one of the first images sent back by Phoenix:

The congressman seems to have a genuine passion for the sciences and it was obvious he was having a blast in there! As one of the people, who were in the chatroom watching, said "He’s a kid in a candy store."

He was also watching the chatroom while he recorded the video, so we were able to actually ask questions to the NASA personnel, through Congressman Culberson. It was really a pretty exciting opportunity!

For more updates and pictures, be sure to check out the Spaceflight Now website: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/phoenix/status.html