Samat Says Samat Jain's personal weblog

I created a new GnuPG key two months ago (see key ID 0x4A456FBA). Now is a good a time as any to publicly announce it. Information for the key:

All this information (as well as the downloadable public key itself) is available on my CryptoKeys wiki page.

The new key uses 4096-bit RSA keys for both digital signatures and encryption. The change is prompted by questions regarding SHA-1’s viability, detailed by Daniel Gillmore. The concern is not new, as Bruce Schneier reported SHA-1 weaknesses back in 2005. The concerns have simply become worse, and they’re likely to become worse. So much so that the US government’s NIST has recommended the phasing out of SHA-1 by the end of 2010. GnuPG’s maintainers don’t trust SHA-1 either, as upstream GnuPG now defaults to RSA as well.

In this space was a paragraph (or four) describing a little bit more in detail the interaction between encryption algorithms (e.g. RSA, DSA), encryption keys, and hash algorithms (e.g. SHA-1/SHA-160, SHA-512), etc. But as an end-user, I don’t care, and I don’t think other end users need to care either. With encryption, I follow the mantra: use the defaults; more than likely you don’t have a clue what you’re doing if you stray. If you use OpenPGP and use an older DSA-based key (2048-bit RSA is safe), keep in mind there may be issues soon regarding it’s security, and you should switch to DSA-2 or RSA (the new default) instead.

Since SHA-1 hasn’t actually been broken yet, I’ve decided to set an expiration date on my old key (0x1A1993D3), rather than outright revoke it.

This summer I fell in love with Starbuck’s Vivanno, their high-protein, high-fiber smoothie beverage. My signature drink: a banana-chocolate Vivanno, one espresso shot, with non-fat milk. Because I was going there so often, and because the new Starbucks and AT&T partnership gave 2 hours free WiFi a day, I started buying things through a free Starbucks Card (essentially a prepaid, reloadable gift card).

Apparently, I went to Starbucks more than I thought. A few weeks ago, Starbucks invited me to be part of their Starbucks Gold program. The program provides a special card, which is quite pretty: the back is standard glossy card fare, but the front is a black matte with gold embossed logo.

Starbucks started this program earlier this summer, and they’ve been tweaking the benefits. The benefits my card comes with (as says the flyer that came with it):

• 10% off most purchases
• Coffeehouse rewards, including special discounts on family and friend days
• Surprise indulgences, like treats on my birthday
• Members-only website and insider promotions

Unfortunately, this comes at a price. It has a membership fee of $25/yr–only the hardcore Starbucks coffee drinkers (which isn’t me) need apply. Also, supposedly, the card does not provide any of the Starbucks Card Rewards, such as the free WiFi, or free milk and syrup options. So far, I’m going to pass on the program, and continue using my old Starbucks Card. But I will keep the pretty-looking card.

Correction: My beta invite entitles me to the Starbucks Gold membership for free. Funny this not indicated anywhere. Also, even though the fine print says Starbucks Card Rewards do not apply, the Starbucks Gold program portal implies that WiFi is an included reward, and it does appear to work…

Update: Now that the Starbucks Gold membership has officially launched for the general public, you can get a description of the benefits in-store. With the Starbucks Gold card, you do not get all the Starbucks Card Rewards–that is, no free syrups, milk or whipped cream, refills on drip coffee, or free tall drink with purchase of whole bean coffee. However, as I mentioned, you do get WiFi.

After over 2 years, I’ve finally upgraded this website from Drupal 4.7 to 6.5. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long while. Hopefully, with the new Drupal version management scheme I’ve developed for Rhombic Networks (article coming soon), along with the advancements in update management within Drupal itself, it will be much easier to keep current with updates.

Like I discussed my last upgrade to Drupal 4.7, there are several new features I’m excited about:

• OpenID support. Instead of having to leave comments anonymously, or waste time creating an account, use your OpenID. If you have your own domain, check out Simon Willison’s article how to turn your blog into an OpenID. I’ve noticed with an OpenID, I find myself commenting and participating on sites much more often. Hopefully I can expect the same of others with my website.
• Drupal’s Mollom module. The old site was getting hit with hundreds of spam comments a day. I gave up trying to filter them all, which meant it took a long time for users’ comments to show up on the site. Hopefully, with Mollom, that will change, and I will be able to screen comments again instead of screening spam. I like Mollom more than I do Akismet.
• Drupal’s Atom module. RSS sucks. You can now aggregate this blog via an Atom feed. Like most home pages on the Internet, most surfers find content on this site via search engines, or via their feed reader.

Hopefully, I can get my development mojo going and finish porting my Drupal Sands and Sands_CSS themes to Drupal 5.x and 6.x. I’m sorry I took so long!

I’m in the process of upgrading this site to Drupal 4.7. Expect a lot to be broken, especially links. Please let me know if you find any problems!

Some changes:

Conversion of Topics taxonomy from a hierarchal taxonomy to a flat, free-tagging taxonomy.

I previously had the “Topics” taxonomy as a hierarchal tree, for example, CentOS would be under Linux. It looked like a good idea before I started to use it, but Drupal and hierarchies don’t work as well as I’d like… I converted it to a flat list, and then turned it into a Drupal 4.7 free-tagging taxonomy. Hopefully this will lead to better tagging of my posts.

Modiying page URLs to end in *.html.

I don’t need to do this, but I want to. It looks nicer, it makes pages easier to save, and it facilitates moving to another CMS if the need ever arises. For many URLs I’ve used permanent redirects to prevent old links from breaking.

I’ve taken my Drupal theme Sands and split it up into two different distributions/versions: one that uses tables for layout (will continue to be called Sands) and one that uses CSS (to be Sands_CSS).

Basically, they are the exact same thing, except a different columns.css and page.tpl.php file.

Drupal’s 4.6 use of the tag triggers strange bugs in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer when using some CSS-column layouts, like the one Sands uses. Splitting into two different themes was the only course of action: though, now that Drupal 4.7 does not use this tag and the bugs no longer occur, it may be a little late in doing this… Oh well.

You can read more about Sands on the page on this site, or through Drupal’s project pages for Sands and Sands_CSS.

I’ve moved my Sands theme to a new location, at samat.org/drupal-themes/sands. The URL is nicer and shorter, and sets me up for the other Drupal themes I would like to create.

I’ve added a “recent comments” sidebar block to the front page so I (and visitors) can keep track of comments people have made. I appreciate the comments–it makes as if people actually read this site!

If you’re not a registered user (it’s easy to become one!) your comments will have to be moderated (by me) before they show up on the page.

Just when you thought I had settled on a domain name, I decide not to! Hah!

I’m going to be moving this site from tamasrepus.rhombic.net to samat.org. Some reasons why:

1. It’s actually available
2. It’s short
3. It’s more me and is more personal (Samat IS my name)
4. Less connection with my company, Rhombic Networks

Some negatives:

1. This is the… 4th or 5th time I’ve changed domains? I’m going to write up a history page one day…
2. It’s eerily similar to my friend Sudarshan’s domain.

While I am going to keep the same Drupal setup, expect some stuff to break. URLs hopefully will remain the same (as they have with tamasrepus.rhombic.net and tamasrepus.hotnudiegirls.com). I think I am going to try to figure out something fancy, such as a script that will issue HTTP status 301 (permanent redirect), which Google respects, so the old URLs don’t stay in search engines forever.

Just to document: my car has hit 30,000 miles today, February 29, 2006, around 12:10 PM, on interstate 10. I forgot to note when it turned 20,000, but my car passed 10,000 miles on September 23, 2002.

For those who visit this site for my Drupal Sands theme, yes, I am adding Mark James’ Silk CMS icons to the theme. All it required was some little PHPTemplate hacks and some CSS. I’m planning on releasing this version of Sands with Drupal 4.7.

In case you don’t like the icons, you’ll be able to remove them with the deletion of a single line in a single CSS file.