Ernie the Attorney talks about encrypting E-mail.

I tried to use the PGP encryption technology with a tech-savvy friend once. I won’t describe the whole process but if you are interested click here. The important thing to understand is that, even if you can figure out how actually encrypt and decrypt emails, part of the process involves creating a special private/public key. In short, it’s a pain in the ass to encrypt emails, even if you know what you are doing. After having done it myself I have come to the conclusion that the only people who are routinely encrypting emails are either uber-geeks or criminals/terrorists. [Ernie the Attorney]

Setting up mail encryption on OS X using Mail.app is actually not too difficult. MacDevCenter has a pretty good article about it (and you can now use Safari instead of Mozilla to request your certificate (make sure to read through the comments at the end)). Once you have it installed it is just a click of a button to sign your messages with your certificate, and if you have received email from someone else with a cert you can encrypt it with the click of another button.

Looks like I’m going to have to install mt-blacklist. Fucking spammers.

vfc links to a great blog post over at Pandragon. Here’s some random babbling about how nifty it is to make this post a little bit longer.

My friend Ellen ordered something online and has been having some issues with it.

I’ve gotten used to buying something electronically and having it available immediately. It’s the defacto way to get small pieces of software these days, tools that do this or that. Last night, I desperately needed a tool from officerecovery.com that would recover a dead powerpoint document for a client. I purchased it online and it shunted me to a site called digibuy.com to do the purchase, which I did. Fullfillment was supposed to come through an email. It’s been about 12 hours and no email.

Am I being too hypersensitive? Expectations too high? I mean, their site did say “within 5 or 10 minutes, 24 X7”, but is this too much to expect, even these days? [Lumpy Gravy]

I don’t think it is too much to expect. They seem to go out of their way to say that you will get the download information rapidly after ordering. Now, knowing the net, it’s common sense that it’s not always going to work, but since they indicate it will you should make a fuss.

Samuel Johnson: “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.” [Quotes of the Day]

# packetlog > links to an article about switching to the Mac over at The Inquirer.

It’s been sixty days today since I left Windows. I feel much better now. There are certainly OS/X foibles that I have to deal with, and the one-button mouse setup had to go. There is an equivalent to the hourglass in OS/X– it’s called the spinning ball of death (SPOD). It’s a busy signal. For the most part, it goes away randomly just as it arrived. The PowerBook that I’m using has WiFi built-in (ExtremeG as it’s called). There’s a nice display. Underneath is BSD, although I can also use ‘fink’ to download then recompile most of the library of Linux and BSD software that lazes on a thousand servers across the world.

The most important item to note is that computers are tools – we control them. I can do most all of the work done before on a litany of breathtaking (for the first month that it’s in release) hardware. I have no desire to overclock the G4 in this machine or the G5 on my desktop. It runs very well, thanks. Squeezing the next hyperthreaded over-coded game has no interest for me. In the corner is a machine – a newly purchased HP Pavilion that’ll do the majority of the Windows compiling and testing that I need. It’s imaged, and wakes up freshly like JayBee Corbell in Larry Niven’s World Out of Time.

But my personal rat race with bugs, fixes, exceptions, gotchas, driver madness, synchronization bipolar disease, and the sheer Prozac of it all, is over. [The Inquirer]

My parents just drove off for a two week vacation and I’m now home alone. It feels weird having this huge place to myself. I’m trying to figure out how I’ll keep myself busy so that I don’t go insane. Any recommendations?

Okay, I’ll admit it, I do tend to enjoy harem shows a bit, and Yumeria is the latest one I’ve been watching. Based on a a PS2 game (that never came out in the US), this show follows the adventures of Mikuri Tomokazu. From AnimeNfo.com:

One day 16 year old Mikuri Tomokazu has a strange dream. In the non-existing world
he sees, a young girl is fighting against enemies. In the dream world, Tomikazu
possesses a strange power and endows them to the girl, who then repels her enemies.

Tomokazu is astonished by the dream world, his strange power and then again the
mysterious girl, who wages war. But on top of all that, when he wakes up, he finds
the girl from the just seen dream next to him! All of a sudden the weird girl named
Mone, Tomokazu’s older Cousin Nanase and his uninvitedly coming classmate Mizuki
begin the fight of the dream world right there!!

I’ve only seen the first four episodes of this show, but it is kinda fun, and supposedly gets more of a storyline as things go on. It is a bit heavy on the fanservice at times, but almost seems to make fun of that fact at the same time. Overall, this show falls into my “enjoyable, but little substance” category. If you need a break from the serious stuff (in my case it was Full Moon wo Sagashite, episode 42 killed me) check it out.

My friend Ellen has started a blog using Movable Type. She’s one of those LJ people, but I think she’s starting to see the light. I say it’s one to check out (even if there are only three posts at the moment).

My favorite book on system administration, The Practice of System and Network Administration, is now also a blog. I definitely recommend both for all sysadmins (of any level).

Edit: Ooops. Forgot a link to the site before.