GPG and learning never to forget a passphrase

So it finally hit me today. I have been messing around with gpg lately on different platforms and using it for file encryption on transfers between places. It’s been a novel and nice idea and I really thought I had gotten it the workflow down, but today it struck me that I had apparently forgotten the passphrase. It’s one that I should have never forgotten, but I did and as a consequence I’ve lost a couple of files I have tried for the last day and a half to decrypt.

I’ve now gone back to a different one, but it is a standard one I use. I don’t like that because it’s been in use for over 10 years on a previous set of keys, but I did change to word order around, so maybe it will be ok. Never ever forget your passphrase. Or at least somewhere keep it or the orginal files in a decrypted state. Although that obviates the need for the encryption…. It’s a process. I’m learning it, but sometimes it seems like I’ve had to relearn it over again.
And no, john the ripper didn’t help, although I did manage to crack a few other passwords on my system that weren’t up to snuff as to complexity. That made it a help.
That’s all for now….

blogilio

So, after trying to find a browser extension that was easy to use and would not add advertising to my blog, I’ve decide to give blogilio, a KDE blogging client a try.

This is just the first of what I hope will be a new series of entries, but as you can see, sometimes my plans and what actually happens are far from reality.
Just a heads up that this is not a dead space. it’s just not as curated as I’d like it to be.

Conundrum – CMYK psd files in GIMP

Before you think I’ve come up with a solution to this problem, understand that I have not. I’m just frustrated by the way I’m going to have to do things. So, I download a bunch of free images, vector packs, psd files that people have put out on the web for designers. The problem comes when the items I’ve downloaded are saved in the CMYK colorspace instead of RGB. Gimp will not open them and even using the convert option with ImageMagick on the command line, I’ve not been able to get a clean enough file to do anything with. So, it appears that I’ll have to actually open the files in photoshop (in windows) and then change the colorspace there, save the file, then re-open in GIMP. If anyone has another idea, I’m open for suggestions.

Document organization and backups with rsync

Before I begin, I’ll assume that you know how to setup cygwin on windows and install various packages. if not then you should really go to the cygwin homepage and read up on it first.

Since creating a cygwin setup on my workstation I have begun to finally get my files organized. I took a tip from LifeHacker’s Gina Trapani’s article, written in 2006, about using just a simple 6 directories as the basis for the organization. Her idea was to use a bak, docs, doc-archives, multimedia, junkdrawer (I called mine temp) and scripts.

Being the type of person I am I figured it was best to start there and move down the trees in as many subfolders as needed. The easiest thing to do was getting the directories set up, but I had to move them at least once as it turned out is was going to bog my workstation down pretty quick with moving all these files around. For some I would even need to sync them to a portable drive to have access to them. I did make the final decision to move them over to the network drive I was connected to.

What makes this whole thing so simple is the rsync utility. After you’ve made your master setup, it becomes trivially easy to make backups to a portable or other drive location.

Typically in a windows setup you will have your mount points under the /cygdrive directory. So if you are using a netwrok or portable drive to send your backup to, then you need to find out where cygwin thinks that drive is located. It will most likely have the same drive letter as it does in windows, but check it to make sure.

For me it was as simple as creating the directory I wanted the backup to go to (in my case a backup of cygwin_home) and telling rsync to get started.

rsync -av ~/* /cygdrive/l/cygwin_home/

The trailing slash is significant. Also I was making it run in archive mode (-a), and verbose (it tells me each file it touches, the -v). The -a is what I use to make sure it copies everything over including directories and that it goes through all the subfolders as well like a -r flag (for recursion) would do.

Once this major item is done then it just becomes a habit to run this everyday or however long you want to choose to do it so that you can maintain a backup of a set of directories.

Be sure to run  a check before so that if you try the delete function with the rsync operation, that you don’t accidentally delete files you wanted to keep. Experienced it myself this weekend.

Back to programming

I have decided to go back and scratch my own itches again with python. It is time for me to get back to solving things through code rather than just designing through html, etc… not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I just like the logic and flow of programming, and beyond the cascade of css selectors, I’m beginning to feel like I’m losing my touch sometimes.

So I went back to Codeacademy.com to run over some refresher exercises to get myself back into the game again. Then I also found a post on daniweb about projects to get started with. Over the next few days/weeks I’ll get more into this and start posting code and my experiences with getting back to this part of my life again. Just a note, I’ll be doing all this within Linux, so my setup of the interpreter and git repositories will not show windows equivalents. I figure you can google for that like the rest of us do.

Life in Linux

About 8-9 days ago I decided I had had enough of the back and forth of dual booting. I booted my laptop into Linux Mint 13 KDE and haven’t gone back to windows since. I work daily in windows, but for my personal machine I have decided to go completely Linux. It has been an interesting few days so far. Trying to get things I really wanted to get working, were sometimes a problem. Tweetdeck of course didn’t work as there is no current version of AdobeAir for Linux. I’ve tried hootsuite and it’s okay, but just not exactly what I am looking for.

Everything is relatively stable at this point. Sometimes I have some audio problems, still trying to figure that end out, mostly related to my usb headset. Graphics wise, it’s been an easy transition. I use photoshop, illustrator, etc at work, but I’ve got The GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus installed on my laptop as well as on my machine at work so the transition is not that difficult for me, just a slightly different workflow. So far the only large problem I have is the lack of a lightroom alternative. I was heavily invested in the lightroom workflow and now I’m at a loss as to what to use. I’m going to try digikam and some others to see if I can find something similar that I can just readjust to.

I’ll keep updating as time goes by.

The whole reblogging/theft thing

I’ve put up a comment on the side over here so it will hopefully always be up alongside the newest post. I’ve only recently come back to wordpress.com and was a little confused when I got a comment that only said -”reblogged this on …”. I’ve made my comment about that on the comment this person made as well as commented about it on their blog under my post that has been copied. It may not be wholesale copying, but it is close.  Short posts are going to end up being copied in their entirety and even with the link back it’s not right.

Maybe I’m just a little older and more versed in etiquette and civility. I’m also more concerned than ever these days with plagiarism and content theft. The things that I write about are things that I’ve done and felt personally. I’d like to feel like I was able to post photos here, but with this reblogging thing happening with WP.com’s implicit endorsement, I don’t feel that I can. I may not stay here. I don’t know. I feel like the people that control WordPress.com have an obligation to disable this feature or at least allow us to block it in some other way than making a blog private. I know that a number of other people feel the same. I’ve always loved wordpress, but this is not something I support or condone and I will make it clear in every post of mine that I don’t support it. maybe if enough people do that, the powers that be at Automattic will decide it’s more in their interests to support those of us that believe in original content.

The blog that I am talking about that reblogged me will not be named by me, but I have looked it over and it appears to not have a single post that is original to it. To me that is just as bad as blogger’s allowance of splogs. Theft by any other name is still theft. Don’t decry it as fair use when there is no commentary or addition to the ideas contained in it.

To all you rebloggers, at least get an original idea yourself.