Unfortunately, although I use PGP on all my emails, it is not much good unless my correspondents also use PGP.  The reason is simple – if you don’t have PGP, you don’t have the capability to interpret the signature file, meaning the file is just so much extra junk.  Also, if you and I both have PGP, emails between us can be encrypted, making them unreadable by third parties.

However, just having the PGP program doesn’t mean that you can prove that the message came from me.  Anyone in the world can create a PGP key file with my name and email address attached – that doesn’t make it me.  You need to prove that the key is also mine.  There is a system called the Web of Trust, which ensures that, even if you have never met a user, there is probably a link between you and them, which can be used to prove the identity of both parties.

The web of trust needs physical links between people, meaning that you need to physically meet and verify users.  This is the hard part, and the part that I am looking for help with.  Although I am located in Victoria, BC (and will gladly exchange keys with anyone in the area), I am also a member of the Canadian navy.  This means that I tend to travel quite a bit.  As I reach other countries, I intend to trade keys with local PGP users, if at all possible.  Unfortunately, OPSEC prohibits me from posting my travel schedule anywhere public, which means that I can’t announce when I will be in a different location.

If I will be at a location for any extended time, I will announce it on my PGP page; however, most of my visits will be only one or two days, so there won’t be much use of the page updates in most cases.  However, I will also announce on my blog when I have arrived in a new location, along with a reminder of my key-signing availability.

If you don’t use PGP, make it one of your New-year resolutions to start.  If you do use it, use the new year to expand your key signatures.

Happy New Year.

Unfortunately, the only way I can currently repair it is using my recovery CD.  This CD, however, will not allow me to perform an operating system repair.  No, instead either Toshiba or Microsoft (or both) decided that, should my operating system decide to shit the bed, I need to erase my hard drive and start over.

Yup, not only did my OS die; now I have to erase all my data and start from scratch.

Officially.

Instead, I realized – hey, I’m out of warranty!  Which means I’m going to perform some surgery, extract my hard drive, and back up any important files to the other computer using an external enclosure.  I haven’t decided yet whether I will reinstall Windows on this machine after I have finished, or if I will switch to Ubuntu.  Both directions have their appeals; either way, though, it looks like I’ll be starting from scratch to resurrect this machine this Christmas.

Anyone have suggestions for alternate recovery methods?  I still need to get an enclosure, so I won’t be doing this for a few days yet.

I previously mentioned my plans to make a tool for automating some of the book-keeping involved in a NaNo project.  I then mentioned that the project was to be put on hold.  Now that my family’s health is good, and that this year’s NaNo is complete, here’s my next attempt to begin this project.

First off, I don’t like the name.  NaNo Tools sounds like it’s a collection of small hammers and screwdrivers for making really small things.  Not that this isn’t cool in its own way, but not the impression I’m going for.  I’m currently bouncing between Word Warrior or SprintWriter.  Suggestions are, of course, graciously accepted.

My plans for features include:

Text editing

The primary purpose of any writing tool is, of course, writing.  I intend to have a fairly minimal interface, with very little to get between the writer and the accumulation of words.  Perhaps two views; a pure-writing view with only the text, and a “normal” view, with all the goodies such as menus and toolbars.  Suggestions?

I have a few ideas for improving word-bashing.  For example, if the writer deletes a large chunk of text, it can instead be marked as “hidden”, but still usable for word counting.  I don’t plan on having fancy formatting; maybe bold and italics, but that’s probably the extent.  The goal of this is to make a utility to bash out a rough draft of as many words as possible within a time limit.  Fancy headings can show up during editing.

Another idea, which was brought up at a write-in, was the concept of blind-writing.  In this mode, the interface won’t show what is being written, or will only show one or two lines.  This is to prevent you from looking back and realizing that you made a mistake two paragraphs ago, then breaking your writing stride to go back and fix it.  This mode won’t be the default, but it will be available.

Live Word Count

Most word processors these days have some basic stats on the bottom of the editing window.  For example, OpenOffice will give you the following information:

• Page number / Number of pages
• Page style
• Writing language
• Insert mode
• Selection mode
• Change indicator
• Digital signature
• View mode
• Zoom

I’m sure that all that information is useful to someone, but not to someone who is trying to meet a word-count (and not quality) deadline.  No word count available – not even a character count!  I think that a word count and current goal are definite requirements; maybe both a daily and an overall count.

Daily Word Count Stats

We all like to see our progress marching forward.  NaNo provides tools for you to brag about your progress, and to compare it with others.  Why not see, even when offline, if your progress is brag-worth?  Have you excelled at any point?  Is there a pattern to your writing bursts?  It’s all your writing stats, which may or may not be important to you.

Planning Calendar

How many words per day do you need to write?  Everyone in NaNo knows that if your goal is 50,000, then your daily goal is 1667 words.  What if you’re in YWP and you’ve set your goal at 25,000?  What if you have a week to produce 10,000?

What happens if you have a burst of creativity producing 6000 words in a single day?  Do you want to slacken your schedule a bit for the rest of the month?  How much slack can you afford?  Are you falling behind?  How will your daily goal be affected if you want to catch up?  Need to schedule a day off, or a specific day with a larger goal?  All these can change your daily writing goals.

With the planning calendar, you can see what you did in the past.  You can also plan for that all-day write-in, where you expect to put a few extra words on the computer.  How about that travel day, where you will spend twelve hours behind the wheel, and not be able to write?  Put them all into your calendar, and it will calculate your word count requirements for the remaining days.  It will also adjust future “standard” goals in relation to what you’ve already written – if you’re falling behind, watch your daily requirements rise.  Likewise, if you’ve built up a good buffer, smile as your daily goals shrink.

Word Sprint Tracking

Word war, word sprint, whatever you want to call it.  You’re at a write-in, and someone yells out “30-minute word war, starts in 5 minutes”.  When the war begins, you enter a keyboard command (you don’t want to take your hands away from the keyboard now!  Time is ticking!), and your current word count is recorded.  At the end of the sprint, you press it again, and your word count for that sprint is instantly available for you.  No more messing around with the calculator, or with word-counting a specific region.  As a bonus, you don’t need to break your writing stride at the beginning of the sprint.

I also plan for this to include network integration, as I know that some sprints are managed by IRC or Twitter bots.  That will be a later-version feature though.

Other Ideas

Does anybody else have suggestions?  A feature that you’d like to see, or that you think is a waste?  Let me know.

Also, I haven’t decided yet on how to release it.  Do you think it will be worth paying for?  What would you pay for a tool like this?  Not saying that I will definitely charge for it, but the idea is there.

Because I am a (mostly) out-of-practice programmer, I intend to build an application to help me with this task.  Some features that I have planned for NaNoTools (name to be fixed later) are:

• Text editing (duh)
• Live word count
• Daily word count stats
• Planning calendar
• Word sprint tracking

Any WriMos have suggestions as to features that they would like to see?

• Unreasonable maximum bids:
  • Emergency!  Expert needed!  Must fix absolutely everything wrong with my system!  $25 maximum bid
• Unreasonable communication requirements:
  • Bidder must be reachable at all times, 24 hours a day, Antarctica time zone
• Unreasonable experience requirements:
  • Bidder must have written 20 apps from scratch using the TwitBook API.
• Unreasonable demonstration of experience:
  • Bidder must show us 20 apps they have written.  We require an NDA before you get any more info
• Unreasonable grasp of reality:
  • (repost) (repost) (repost) Why isn’t anybody replying to my ad? $25 maximum bid
• Unreasonable grasp of geography:
  • Need programmer for North American properties database.  Geographically restricted to Antarctican coders only.

Yes, it’s better than going out and trying to find clients, but some of the ads are painful to follow.

However, hunting through the docs was painful.  The official docs aren’t organized in a logical way (I had to rely heavily on example code, rather than proper API documentation).  Then, there’s the errors.

You see, unlike a local library, there is no debug version of the FB API.  This means that, if I’m having issues, all I can do is plug in a parameter and rely on the error code to tell me what I’m doing wrong.  This doesn’t help AT ALL if the error message I get back is:

{“error”:{“type”:”Exception”,”message”:”(#1) An unknown error occurred”}}

Not very helpful.

Eventually, I figured it out, but couldn’t find any documentation (or even a blog post) on it.  Facebook only allows Unix-style EOL characters (LF), not DOS-style (CR LF).  Not fun to debug

Anyway, I’ve re-found the site Rent a Coder, where programmers (such as myself) can find projects to work on, without dealing with the hassle of advertising, accounting, management, etc.  In other words, for an administration fee (taken from my payment), I’m cleared of dealing with non-payment (everything is held in escrow), advertising (although I do have to propose my services in response to RFPs), accounting (client pays RaC, RaC pays me), etc.

It turns out to be a supplement to my income, and allows me to keep my skills in play.

Maybe I should have thought it all the way through; obviously there was some way that they had to fulfill their advertised numbers, but WTF?  From now on, I’m staying with the old-fashioned way of following and getting followers – find something related to my own interests.

I was experimenting with recovering data from a semi-fried USB stick.  Then, with it still plugged in, I tried to sync my iPod music using MediaMonkey.

Little did I realize, all my drive letters had been mixed up.

The computer thinks that the USB stick is my F: drive (which contains the music), my music drive is G: (which is my iPod), and my iPod is H:.  So it tries to copy non-existent music from the stick to the hard drive.

This wouldn’t be a problem, but for some reason that probably made sense at the time, I configured MM to automatically erase files on the destination that aren’t in the sync list.  Unfortunately, this includes all the music in my collection which doesn’t exist in the empty USB-stick sync list.

Fortunately, I realized that it was taking a long time erasing files, so I was able to cancel it.  Then I fumbled around for a recovery tool, which I found (eventually) in Recuva.  So I’ve managed to (almost) get everything back; only 342 files (out of an original 20763) need to be recovered by other means.  That’s about 1.6% loss; it could have been much worse.

Shorteners, although convenient and necessary for microblogging, have a tendency to obscure the linking structure that makes the web usable.  They add another service that goes between the browsing user and the browsed site.  Another point of failure in an already fragile system.  Someone to absorb your pagerank, add advertisements, and add delays to browsing.  And, of course, to redirect to shock sites.

And yet, with a 140-character limit to microblogging bursts, it’s often necessary to shorten URLs.  Yes, it’s a short-term gain, but what are the long-term effects?  And how long will it take us to realize them?

I, for one, will continue to microblog with shortened URLs; I doubt that my Twitter usage will significantly impact my blog’s stats.  My followers know I’m not likely to post a link to shock them, except maybe for April 1st.