March, 2009

Technology — 2 Comments
26
Mar 09

New Web Host

This afternoon I took the plunge and transfered my website from BlueHost to Webfaction. There are two main reasons for this switch. First of all, I’ve been learning website programming with Python and the Django framework. My previous host does not support Django, and it seems Webfaction is the most popular host among Django geeks. Also, BlueHost does seem to oversell a litle too much, while I’ve heard good things about Webfaction in that regard. There is one good thing that I’ll say about Bluehost though, which is that their tech support is friendly and very fast.

This afternoon I purchased my Webfaction account, then made a dump of my MySql DB for Wordpress, created a tarball of the Wordpress site files, then downloaded both to my laptop. Webfaction supports full shell/SSH goodness, so I then SCP’d both files to the server. I had a bit of trouble with importing my MySql dump into a new database, so within minutes of submitting a support ticket, I recieved a responce containing two SED lines to fix the problem. A few minutes latter I was up and running.

30 minutes ago I pointed my domain name to the new servers, and I am waiting for the settings to propagate to DNS servers world wide. Meanwhile, Webfaction does not provide DNS hosting, so I purchased a Network Solutions account, and am waiting for crashsystems.net to transfer there. Once that happens, I’ll finally be able to create my own bloody cname records (DNS tunnel FTW!).

Technology — 1 Comment
25
Mar 09

Boot Performance In Ubuntu 9.04

Inspired by a meme making it’s rounds on Planet Ubuntu and elsewhere on the interwebs, I decided to profile my boot. For several weeks now I have been running the development version of Ubuntu 9.04, and reporting the occasional bug. So far everything has been very stable.

I have 9.04 installed on my Inspiron 1420, using the ext4 filesystem (also quite stable in my experience), with noatime set in /etc/fstab. My CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo clocked at 1.5 GHz, 4GB of ram and a very average 80GB SATA hard drive.

Profiling a boot with bootchart was as simple as “sudo apt-get install bootchart”. With that done, I just rebooted my machine. Once I was back up, there was a .png file in /var/log/bootchart containing the details of my boot process.

Boot time == 20.27 seconds!

And now for the gory details…

bootchart

Technology — Comments Off
15
Mar 09

New GnuPG keys

The idea behind encryption is to make the difficulty of retrieving your private messages higher than the value the attacker perceives in retreating those private messages. In theory, the more content you protect with a set of keys, the more worthwhile an attempt to try to break the cryptography (or whack the key owner upside the head with a wrench) . Because of this, it is a good idea to make new keys every few years.

I have done just that. I’ve created two files, each containing text explaining that I’ve created new keys. The first copy is signed by my old key, 284005FE. The second copy is signed by my new key, E5C4E3B1. If you already trust my old key, then you can verify these signatures to prove that you can trust my new key. If not, feel free to arrange a key signing party with me. Bring beer or coffee.

Miscellaneous — Comments Off
3
Mar 09

Simple email encryption with FireGPG

Privacy was once the default for most conversations between individuals. While the Internet has become an extremely useful tool for facilitating conversation, it has also done away with almost all of the privacy that was once inherent in communication. This has profound societal consequences that few have even begun to contemplate. Furthermore, the spread of unencrypted email means that it is nearly trivial for various repressive governments to spy on those who differ from the government sanctioned political and religious norms.

Though the technology was once closely guarded by the United States government as a form of export controlled munitions, encryption is now freely available to the masses. However, much of the technology is not easily understandable by the masses. With this in mind, I wrote Simple email encryption with FireGPG as a cross platform guide for email encryption, with a target audience of ordinary, non-technical Internet users.

Simple email encryption with FireGPG is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license, meaning you are free to copy it, share it, modify and translate it, as long as you do so under the terms of the license. If you do make a derivative or translation, please tell me about it so that I can link to it from the project page.

I plan on periodically updating the guide as changes are made in the FireGPG extension. If you have suggestions for improvement, please leave a comment on this page or contact me. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for updates.

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