I just received a copy of my book in Russian. Now I know what my name looks like in Russian, although I have no idea how to type it here. The book has a picture of the Apache helicopter on the cover. I would expect that this would be confusing to potential buyers, but perhaps very few people actually make that name connection - particularly outside the US. Or maybe it's just me.
I just wasted almost my entire morning generating web of trust diagrams
Key signing this evening. Some folks coming in from out of town, and, hopefully, folks from in the area that we don't get to come out very often.
Perhaps I take it a little too seriously, but I feel that attending these events is one of my obligations to the Apache community, so that folks can verify distros. And I'm pretty well linked to anyone that is ever likely to do an Apache release. Of course, by proxy, I'm pretty well connected to people that will do releases of other software too, so it works for that too.
Using the script at http://www.cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/pgp_party/party-table.pl to generate sheets to take to the signing, for easy verification of keys, and reduced chances of mis-copying keys as they are read off. The trick is getting people to read off of their own copy of their key, rather than just reading off of the sheet, and thus proving that they can read, not that the key is the real one. ;-)
Note that the default behavior is to output a sheet for your entire keyring. If you replace the line:
@fps = `gpg --fingerprint --keyring $ARGV[0]`;
with
@fps = `gpg --fingerprint @ARGV`;
then you can just type a list of keyIDs (or names) that you wish to appear on the sheet, and get something more customized to the event in question.
On a related note, you might want to look at the GPG key with key ID 1234 5678. Just kinda funny.
For many moons, I've been complaining about the fact that no browsers allow you to log out of BASIC HTTP auth. Seems that Mozilla is finally considering implementing this.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55181
So, eventually, the "how do I log out" FAQ in the Apache auth tutorial will have to include this information. And maybe some other browsers will follow suit. You'd think that after 10 years of people asking for this feature, it could have happened a little sooner.
See also this page about how to do this in IE. But I don't really understand that one.
After a little more reflection, and particularly after reading Ken's comments, I'm still feeling a little distanced from what happened, but I can certainly see that this is more than just the death of some people I didn't know.
Indeed, every man's death diminishes me. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And in that sense, I tend to feel much more affected by the horrible disasters that happen in Africa every day and are a bullet point, or not even mentioned at all, in the western press. On the day that the WTC fell, killing more than 3000 people in the worst disaster on US soil, more than 5000 people died in gas line explosions, and subsequent fires, in Nigeria. One was not worse than the other at the time, but one has clearly had wider repurcussions in the lives of every living human being.
So when a space vehicle crashes, what are those wider repurcussions? Last week, I was doing Apache training, and one of my students was connected with NASA via her work, and she remained confident that the space program will not lose funding, and will not lose steam. Accidents happen, and this is not the end of the line. Finding out why it happened, and not letting it get in the way of future discovery, is the goal of the moment, as evidenced by the detail being given to going through the evidence even at this very moment.
The death of one individual is not more tragic, or less tragic, than the death of another. Every time an individual dies, be it spectuacularly, or quietly at home, we are all affected in some way, and those close to the person will grieve whether the person was a prince or a pauper. But some events, like this one, are genuinely tragedies of national, and perhaps international scale, because of the lasting effects that they will have on policy, discovery, and our future.
Ken, thanks for your comments, and for putting things into a sensible perspective.
