We’re back! (by alaric)

We're back in our house! We just spent the first night back in it...

We've got upstairs cleaned out enough to move back in, but downstairs is still a pile of bags and boxes and furniture, waiting for us to put the furniture into place so we can unload all the stuff onto it.

Keysigning party – London, 2nd June (by alaric)

I've somehow ended up organising a keysigning party in London on the 2nd of June.

See the page for directions to the venue (it's in South Kensington).

So if you have a PGP keypair (or take part in CACert.org or Thawte's web of trust), come along. If you don't, but are interested in being able to exchange military-grade encrypted or signed messages, then set up GNU Privacy Guard - see their manuals for more details - and create yourself a keypair (your own digital identity) - or several - and bring along your key IDs and fingerprints to have them vouched for and vouch for everyone else's.

I've made myself some MOO cards to hand out my key details on:

Interoperability and Demesnes (by alaric)

There are two main kinds of standards involved in interoperability between computers: formats and protocols. Formats range from "file formats" such as JPEG and PNG for images, HTML and CSS for web pages, PDFs, Word documents, and so on, through to much simpler things such as how an integer is represented. Formats specify how information is represented as strings of 1s and 0s, the basic model of information that computers agree on.

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Social Networking (by alaric)

Although I'm not a big fan of Facebook, I occasionally feel an urge to update my real social network: my FOAF profile at http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric-foaf.rdf. I've not made that link clickable, to save people the horror of having their confused browser show them a pile of raw RDF. This time, since I've been reminded my somebody that my PGP identity has been a bit unmaintained, I've been putting my key out on keyservers, updating the identities attached to it, and putting signatures on my FOAF documents, then linking to them with the Web of Trust ontology so it's all linked properly in RDF. My PGP key ID is 7371086A.

The reason I'm not a big fan of facebook and other social network sites is that they're centralised. I have to give all my data to some third party and rely on them to keep their servers running! It's the same problem that most instant messaging systems, like MSN Messenger or whatever they call it these days (Live Something). I have to rely on the kindness of a third party to keep it going, and I have to trust them with my stuff.

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Type systems (by alaric)

There are a number of type systems out there in different programming languages. In fact, there's zillions, but they boil down to a few basic approaches.

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