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  1. gpg --ask-cert-level considered harmful

    Occasionally, someone asks me whether we should encourage use of the --ask-cert-level option when certifying OpenPGP keys with gpg. I see no good reason to use this option, and i think we should discourage people from trying to use it. I don't think there is a satisfactory answer to the …

  2. OpenPGP User ID Comments considered harmful

    Most OpenPGP User IDs look like this:

    Jane Q. Public <jane@example.org>
    

    This is clean, clear, and unambiguous.

    However, some tools (gpg, enigmail among others) ask the user to provide a "Comment:" field when they are choosing a new User ID (e.g. when making a new key). These …

  3. It's Advertising all the way down

    Today i saw a billboard on the side of a bus. It was from a cable TV channel, bragging about how well-connected their viewers are (presumably on the internet, social media, blogs, etc).

    It shows a smiling, attractive man, with text next to him saying something like "I told 9000 …

  4. proprietary software activation fail

    i have a colleague who is forced by work situations to use Windows. Somehow, I'm the idiot\^W\^W\^W\^W\^Wfriendly guy who gets tapped to fix it when things break.

    Well, this time, the power supply broke. As in, dead, no lights, no fan, no nothing. No problem …

  5. visualizing MIME structure

    Better debugging tools can help us understand what's going on with MIME messages. A python scrap i wrote a couple years ago named printmimestructure has been very useful to me, so i thought i'd share it.

    It reads a message from stdin, and prints a visualisation of its structure, like …

  6. libasound2-plugins is a resource hog!

    I run mpd on debian on "igor", an NSLU2 -- a very low-power \~266MHz armel machine, with no FPU and a scanty 32MiB of RAM. This serves nicely to feed my stereo with music that is controllable from anywhere on my LAN. When playing music and talking to a single mpd …

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