Monthly Archives: October 2004

GeekRant.org Primer: GPG encryption in five minutes or your money back

A while back I was given the task of setting up encryption for sending files around. Ooh. Sounds tricky, I thought. I’ve seen PGP signatures on privacy freaks’ e-mail for years now, but it all seemed a bit like black magic. I had no idea how it worked.

I went looking, and it turns out it’s not really particularly difficult to figure out or get working. But I had to wade through a few hefty (in web terms) manuals to find all the info I needed. I never really found a web page which detailed the basics in an easy to digest format. This could be that page.

PGP and GPG

PGP is Pretty Good Privacy, invented by Phil Zimmerman and now run by the PGP Corporation. It’s the defacto standard for this kind of stuff. It’s fairly secure, and has the added benefit of compressing text quite well. PGP sell a number of solutions, but if you’re wondering about freebies, then…

GPG is Gnu Privacy Guard, which is the free implementation of (most of) PGP. It lives here: www.gnupg.org.

How to use it

Encryption of this type is all about keys. If you haven’t grasped the key concept before, here it is in brief: a recipient has a public and a private key. The public key is given to anybody. Senders encrypt stuff using the public key. Only the recipient has the private key, and uses this to decrypt stuff. Obviously if communication is two-way, you need multiple public and private keys. Okay? Easy.
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My MySQL

I’ve recently moved my web site development from Windows/ASP to Linux/PHP/MySQL. I’m a child of the GUI generation so I went looking for a cheap GUI for MySQL. I found better than cheap – I found free.

DBMananger allows you to manage MySQL, PostgreSQL, Interbase/Firebird, SQLite, Xbase, MSAccess, MSSQL Server, Sybase and Oracle. I’ve used it once to get the database for www.criticalconf.com up and running and so far it’s doing all I asked for. It uses your standard SQL manager layout so there’s little, if any, learning curve and as a newcomer to MySQL that’s a bonus for me.

I’m about to launch in to a much more ambitious project so I’ll be able to give a fuller review once that’s done.

Gads

When I look at this site, in the Google Ad I consistently get public service announcements, or more commonly, an advert for a Word to HTML conversion tool.

When I looked at this site at Tony’s place, it came up with ads for AFL memorabilia on eBay.

Interesting, very interesting. Tony’s a big AFL fan, and I can only speculate that Google is doing some tracking of sites visited.

Other ad operators such as DoubleClick got flack when they originally started doing that, serving tracker cookies with their ads, building up usage patterns. I don’t recall hearing about Google doing the same thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised. After all there’s thousands upon thousands of sites using Google AdSense now, plus they could track your Google searches (it’s known that they do use a user cookie to keep your preferences). Might be time to trawl through Google’s T&Cs again.

PS. Okay, I just got an AFL ad. Maybe they’re not tracking?

Okay, we’re running

Obviously in a geek blog, you should blog about how the blog got setup.

Domain name. Geekrant.com and .net were already taken, but .org was free. I registered it with Gandi. They’re a French company, have been around for a while. I think I first encountered them some years ago in a list of domain registrars. At the time they were up near the top of the recommended registrars not only for being reasonably cheap and reliable, but also for having a domain registration policy that precluded all sorts of the kind of legal mumbo jumbo that some other registrars had at the time, which theoretically gave you rather less than complete control over your domain. Whatever the reason I originally went with them, they’ve been good over the years, and provide useful stuff like free domain and e-mail forwarding. At 12 Euros a year, perhaps not the cheapest around, but reliable and quick. Quicker than I thought, actually. I assume Those In Charge have improved the speed of new domain propagation over the last few years, because everything seemed to be done after a couple of hours.

Hosting. The hosting is at Aussie Hosts, a mob in Brisbane who specialise in shared hosting on Linux, and using the Plesk7 web site control software, which is frikkin’ marvellous. I’ve never come across a web control panel quite so useful and user-friendly. It does everything, and is light-years ahead of most of the other very clunky web control panels I’ve seen.

Software. Installing WordPress is dead easy. Upload the files into the http directory, create the MySql directory and its user in Plesk, then run WordPress’s install script. That’s it. It creates all the tables, creates the initial user, and away you go. Then I logged-on to WordPress and created the users, set the various options like comment spam parameters, and structure of permalinks. For the latter it tells you what your .htaccess needs to look like. You just paste it into the file and you’re done. (Admittedly it shat itself the first time I tried it. I wiped it out, and tried it again a bit later. Not sure what was different the second time, but it worked.)

Template. For WordPress’s templates, you basically need to edit: index.php (the main page), wp-layout.css (the stylesheet), and wp-comments.php (the comments section, which for some reason WP’s default installation has quirks like the caption for the comment fields appearing after the fields themselves. Wacky). I’m not entirely a master of CSS yet, so I just fiddled with the fonts and colours, and fiddled a bit with the links and so on. I’ve messed the template up slightly — right now the XHTML validation gets a thumbs-down. Will fix that when I get the chance to look at it.

We started creating a (perhaps over-ambitious) hierarchy of categories for articles to fall into. Hmm. Probably should have just copied out of DMOZ or Yahoo or something. (Just the hierarchy that is. If you look around, it’s incredible the number of directory sites that have swiped content completely from Yahoo.)

Also created a basic logo in my trusty old copy of Corel Photopaint, added in a Google advert to try and recoup some of the hosting and domain name costs, and that’s about it for now. Further fiddling can (and no doubt will) come later.

Missing the bloat

A colleague was pasting a picture into his Powerpoint presentation. Some kind of diagram, and unfortunately he didn’t have the original document it came from, so no matter which Paste Special option he tried, it came through as a bitmap. Saved it to disk, e-mailed it to someone else, and wondered why it took so long.

Then he saw the size. It had blown out from a couple of hundred K to over 4Mb.

So he tried zipping it. WinZip took it down to, believe it or not, 80Kb.

No wonder people complain about Microsoft bloatware… sometimes it’s not just the apps, it’s the way they store stuff as well.

Pointless dialog

Digging out an old Word97 document at work, I loaded it up into Word 2K. It displayed fine, but I noticed an embedded Draw98 diagram in it that needed updating. Double-clicked, it produced an error to the effect that it wasn’t going to happen ‘cos Draw98 wasn’t on the machine. Okay. Right-click… ah… it can convert it to something else… choose that, and what do I see but this:

Convert Draw98 to Draw98?

Very handy, eh? And if you’re wondering, clicking OK got the error again. Pretty sloppy from a coding point of view.

I did a bit of digging and found an MSKB article which said no problem, just install Draw98 again… and even a handily placed link to it.

Click, download, run. Nup. It wants an Office 97 application on the machine to install! Triffic. And all this recommended in a KB article purporting to apply to Word 2K.

The article also suggests digging into your archive for Word 2, for a copy of Draw (that’d be 16 bit, surely? Eugh!)

If you don’t have 10 year old floppies hanging about, you can also get at the picture and edit it in Word’s Picture Editor. Not as good for this particular drawing, but it might have to do if I can’t do it any other way.

Or else re-do it from scratch in Visio…

Excuse the dust

Welcome to Geekrant.org. Still getting things setup. The idea came yesterday when mucking about with MamboServer. Mambo is a fine product, with a lot of cool features, and was in contention for a web site of mine. But yesterday it finally dawned on me that Mambo doesn’t allow a post to sit in multiple categories. That just plain sucks. Along with the URLs it spits out, some of which are what they call “SEF” — Search Engine Friendly — but are in no way human-friendly, that was the nail in the coffin. That site’s going WordPress instead.

Like this one. And several sites I’ve setup, in fact.

So I e-mailed a couple of mates to ask if anybody wanted to join in. Josh reads his mail every few days when he’s not at work… no doubt he’ll get back to me sooner or later. But Tony’s in. That was good enough. A few hours later, the domain is registered, WP’s setup, and it’s all systems go. Idea to web site in less than 24 hours. Not bad.

Well, apart from little things like the site design/CSS/template. Yeah. Well. All in good time.

So what is this? A place for people to rant or talk about geeky stuff. Issues they’ve come across, clever things they’ve done, wondrous things they’ve discovered.

More later.