Friday, August 29, 2003

Off to NY

Well, heck, one of our Netware servers decided to go belly up right after lunch... of course it happens on the Friday before a holiday weekend. So I'm off to NY so that I can go in the office first thing tomorrow morning and take a crack at fixing it.

posted by Wuphon's at 4:46 PM

Japanes IME

This is just one of those things that scratches my tech itch... under MS-WindowsXP (and some older versions), there is an add-in called the "Input Method Editor" (IME) which is how MS-Windows allows you to enter non-western text using a western keyboard.

The basic concept is that you type in text using romaji (e.g. type in "anata") and the IME gives you the corresponding kana. If there are multiple kana/kanji, the space bar will bring up a list of all of the kanji/kana symbols that fit the current text. All in all, it's very slick, application independent (I was working with OpenOffice to test it out), and useful. Being able to type in using romaji makes it easier for someone like me who knows English instead of also having to learn how to use a Japanese keyboard.

Granted, it's still going to take me another 5 years to learn the language enough to be comfortable in it, but this gives me the ability to work without some proprietary program (other then using Microsoft...). I've only been really buckling down and trying to learn kana for about 5 or 6 months now. Of course, I've been watching anime for over a decade, so I know a lot of words and phrases, but much of that is without context, focus, and full of idiom that I don't have a good grasp on how the language is supposed to fit together. Since I am primarily a tactile/visual learner, it was time to switch to learning written Japanese instead - which requires that I learn grammer and spelling (which kana/kanji to use and when because multiple kanji can be pronounced identically).

So I've been grabbing any images of kana/kanji that I can get ahold of and slowly trying to tease meaning out of the symbols. Manga works well because there is context to go with the symbols. The wall in front of my desk is covered with tables of kana for quick reference and to help me slowly memorize the kana. Again no rush, I usually learn something new or puzzle something out once a week, which is slow but steady progress. Learning kanji is going to be the daunting task and will require buckling down and using flashcards and rote memorization until I get it down.

(Side-Notes)

The Japanese character set is comprised of 2 different types of characters. Kanji is a large set of pictorial symbols (thousands and thousands) which represent whole words / phrases / ideas. The usual rule of thumb that I hear is that you need to know 2,000 kanji to read a newspaper. Kana is a smaller set of phonetic symbols that can be used to spell out words that you may not know the kanji for. In addition, there are 2 types of Kana; Hiragana symbols are used to represent traditional japanese words, while Katakana symbols are used to represent words borrowed from other languages. (There is a 1:1 mapping between Hiragana and Katakana in that for every Katakana symbol, there is a Hiragana symbol.) There are maybe 100-120 hiragana symbols and 100-120 katakana symbols (too lazy to count). And since kana symbols match sylables it's easier to learn kana first.

Plus, there's the fun that most japanese is written vertically, top-to-bottom, but you read the columns from right-to-left. However, sometimes it is written horizontally which can be either left-to-right or right-to-left (still puzzling out how to tell which way to read horizontal text).

posted by Wuphon's at 12:03 AM

Thursday, August 28, 2003

ScotteVest

Wired News: ScotteVest Good Fit for Bitheads - very cool jacket since I tend to be a packrat at carrying gear around.

I like the black FineTex shell the best, although the fleece isn't bad looking either.

(Of course, the question is whether the jacket says "mug me".)

posted by Wuphon's at 3:15 PM

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Varied and Chaotic

I mentioned to someone once that my interests and hobbies are varied, fleeting and chaotic... (they were trying to get me to sign-up into a volunteer position).

Just one of those odd phrases flying around my head atm, figured I'd toss it out there to make people question my sanity. (And lighten up the blog a bit since it's gone all technical and stuff lately.)

posted by Wuphon's at 7:43 PM

SMTP Wish List

While thinking about the various proposals for reducing/eliminating domain spoofing on e-mail (or at least, giving the destination servers the power to determine whether the domain is spoofed or not) - I also wondered why public key encryption has not also been added to SMTP yet so that inter-server communications is encrypted.

The public keys could be stored in DNS records or perhaps the origin SMTP server could merely ask the destination SMTP server for it's public key (ask for the hash first so that keys could be cached, only grab the full key if it's changed).

Lots of attacks possible as well as some implementation issues that I can think of right off the bat. Such as man-in-the-middle attacks that are possible if the SMTP servers get the keys directly from each other (DNS is a better source, especially if DNSSEC comes to pass so that DNS request packets can't be forged/faked). Also, do all of the domain's SMTP servers use a shared public key, or will it vary based on which MX record you use? I'm sure the various governments would also get involved and politics would come into play.

One possible avenue of implementation would be if say, Postfix were to implement a public-key exchange and use encryption when talking to other Postfix servers. Assuming the technical details aren't horrendous, it might then perculate into QMail and the other MTA software for inter-operability and marketing clout.

There's been at least one proposal floating around out there that tries to make IPSEC opportunistic by storing the public keys in DNS records - but that would require O/S vendors to get involved and I don't see Microsoft doing that any time soon. I think getting the SMTP traffic to implement opportunistic encryption is more likely because there's no monopoly in SMTP MTA software and it could easily become a selling point.

(This isn't even a new idea, I've found papers on the net going back to late-1990s proposing the same idea.)

posted by Wuphon's at 3:39 PM

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Anti-Domain Spoofing Proposals

Here's the current list of the 4 proposals that I know about.

RMX proposal
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rmx_records/

SMTP+SPF proposal
http://spf.pobox.com/site-index.html

DMP proposal
http://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-fecyk-dsprotocol-04.txt

DRIP proposal
http://community.roxen.com/developers/idocs/drafts/draft-brand-drip-01.html

posted by Wuphon's at 1:13 PM

Monday, August 25, 2003

New E-Mail Address

I'm in the midst of moving e-mail from yahoo over to my actual domain (wuphonsreach at wuphonsreach dot org). As a result, I'm also in the process of setting up a new GPG key.

There is an add-in package for mozilla mail called Enigmail that makes use of the command line GPG to do the encryption/signing. Here's the short list of how to set it up:

1) download GPG binaries for Windows, version that I got was 1.2.3

2) Extract the contents of GPG to somewhere on your HD, preferably into a folder that you will be backing up on a regular basis. For the security minded, you may wish to place this folder inside of an encrypted volume (I use PGPDisk).

3) Add the GPG folder to your PATH= environment variables. Under Windows2000/XP this is done by right-clicking on My Computer, going to Properties - Advanced - Environment Variables and adding the GPG folder to the end of the existing PATH= line (don't forget to put a semi-colon in prior to the new folder).

4) Look at readme.w32 in the GPG folder. Create the registry key HKCU/Software/GNU and a sub-key called GNUPG then create a string value called "HomeDir" and give it the path to your GPG folder (e.g. "C:/MyStuff/GNUPG") - note the forward slashes.

5) Go to the GPG folder, run "gpg --gen-key" and follow the prompts. The FAQ is useful, but recommended settings are "DSA and ElGamal", 1024 or 2048 bits, and 1 year expiration.

6) Use the command "gpg --export -a" to spit your public key (never publish your private key!) out to the screen (or you may want to pipe it into a text file) and give your public key to your friends.

7) To make it easier for people to find your key, go to MIT PGP Public Key Server and publish your public key.

8) At this point, I'm off to configure Enigmail. (Currently, I'm looking at the help file.)

posted by Wuphon's at 11:56 PM

If this is Monday

... then it must be August.

The past week has been a complete blur. Complicated job in the queue at work, the worms, the aftermath of the worms, and the usual zillion and one things that need to get done this month - all of which means that I'm feeling a bit like I'm in a blender that's turned on puree. I was even planning on taking a day trip to Wash DC on Saturday (spur of the moment decision on Friday), but that didn't happen because I missed my bedtime Friday night. Instead, I think I'll just take a day off next week and go then.

Hosting provider sent me a note yesterday that I'm over my 5Gb limit for the month... probably because of the SimCity4 pages getting slowly more popular - or more likely it's my signature images that I use for avatars in various places. Guess I'll have to grab my log files and find out. Worse come to worse, I'll move some stuff to my 2nd hosting account - but the hostiing company hasn't shut the tap off yet so it's no rush.

Mozilla 1.4 has been out since late June, it's stable (other then the traditional and periodic Netscape-like corruption of it's file cache) and I'm slowly replacing my using IE6. On the open source side, I'm also in the middle of installing OpenOffice to see how well that works at replacing MSOffice. I have seen OpenOffice mentioned a few times on slashdot.org and I needed to install a spreadsheet program on the gaming machine anyway so I'm taking the plunge.

posted by Wuphon's at 9:15 PM