Blog style entries never really worked. I hope that having everything together in just a few pages on a site makes it easier for people who want to turn up.

I hope that it floats up higher in Google Rankings as well. This will also make it easier for people who want to turn up.

It turns out that it is quite simple to set up a minimal GPG environment – one that lets you work on the command line without having to set it up for Mail.app. This is about all I need it for.

The GPGTools project has recently resurrected the MacGPG project to provide email encryption and tools to the Mac. It is still in development, and I didn’t want to mess about with my Mail installation so rather than install the complete set of tools, I chose to install MacGPG2 and GPGKeychain Access

MacGPG2 is the OpenPGP implementation for the Mac. This installs gpg2 into /usr/local/bin and gpg is symlinked to gpg2. I only mention this because although the commands can all be issued as gpg, you get to the documentation by using man gpg2, not man gpg. Installation is through an installer package.

GPGKeychain Access does not integrate with the Mac Keychain as the name might suggest, but provides a window to look at and manage the keys that you have on your system. These are usually under ~/.gnupg/ Run the installer, and create your keys. It’s quite simple and there is a video on the project page. However, there are a couple of things that you should keep in mind. If you forget your passphrase you can’t use your private key anymore. And if you’ve published the key, you won’t be able to revoke it and it will just sit around on keyservers. So, set an expiry date on your keys in case you do lose the private key or passphrase. As the expiry date comes up just extend it again.

There is no key-server configured. There seems to be a ticket for this to be implemented in some future milestone. Until then, create a file called gpg.conf under ~/.gnupg and put this line in it:

keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu

And that is just enough so that when you use the menu items that send and get keys from keyservers they will work. As far as I know, these servers talk to each other, so writing to one makes the key visible on the others.

Synchronisation of keys is an issue. If you are adventurous you could add more entries to the gpg.conf file to use a central location for the keyrings, somewhere like Dropbox or iDisk, so that all your machines can use the same files. But, it’s just as easy to export the keys as text and use those files to keep different machines in sync. Partcularly if you will be using gpg rarely.

This has been a companion piece to the non-Mac centric 365Git post about signed tags.

And on we go to the next monthly meeting which is on January the 18th at 7pm. We’ll try the usual venue of The George Inn, 77 Borough High Street. SE1 1NH.

Please make sure that you’re subscribed the proper calendar. I think the update of MobileMe Calendar killed the old link. So, you can subscribe to the calendar using this link. I think the alarms are pushed as well, so don’t be surprised if you get a reminder 3 days before.

You can also keep up to date by following the NSCoder Night Category.

If it’s your first time, contact me about getting my mobile number so you can find us if it isn’t obvious where/who we are. Or, DM the Twitter account.

See you in a couple of weeks.

The new MacBook Airs don’t have Flash installed by default so this is a tl:dr summary of those two articles so you don’t have to download and install the system-wide Flash player.

Many sites, such as YouTube, provide content in an alternative format for devices that do not have Flash installed. Get access to this from Safari by turning on the ‘Develop’ menu (Preferences | Advanced) and change the User Agent to ‘Mobile Safari 3.2.2 iPad’. This works per tab|window so doesn’t change the display in what you already have open.

If this still doesn’t work (I’m looking at you iPlayer) then you can use Google’s Chrome browser, which comes with its own Flash plug-in.

The December meeting is on the 14th (second Tuesday) rather than the 21st (third tuesday). This will be at the usual place, although we may have to move if it gets too crowded. If you don’t already have my phone number this would be a good time to ask me for it. I’d like to be able to put it up publicly, but there are too many idiots in the world.

So – Friday night, October 22 at 6:30 at the usual place and we’ll do some crystal ball gazing together.

Pop open your terminal, or console, or whatever your command-line application is and type the following:

curl --head shorturl

This pops up a short amount of useful information about the target url. For example the response for the Google short URL for this site shows this;

~ % curl --head http://goo.gl/oQx8
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:01:51 GMT
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:01:51 GMT
Cache-Control: private, max-age=86400
Location: http://abizern.org/
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Server: GSE
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

And you can see that the Location shows that you aren’t going to get Rick-rolled.

20 minutes is far too short to cover such a large subject but I did what I could. I have been given another opportunity to present in the future and I’m going to skip the boring beginner bits and just cover 3 or 4 advanced Git techniques which should be more fun.

For what it’s worth, here are the slides. Probably not much help unless you were there (I prefer more talk and less slides) and I apologise for being weak and using bullet points.

Download the Keynote presentation (540 kb)

Download the PDF slides (220 kb)

I went to my first London Python Dojo last night and had a better time than I expected. I know a little Python (just enough to hurt myself). I was intrigued by this event where the idea was to learn together rather than just share knowledge.

The evening started off with beer and pizza, thanks to our hosts Fry-IT, and then moved on to two short presentations. The first was on FluidDb and the second was something to do with creating Python packages. Yes, both were over my head.

After that there was a short discussion about a problem to attempt. A blackjack game was suggested and we split into 5 groups of four and had a little under an hour to solve this. I didn’t have much confidence that we could do it. One person sat at a laptop, we spent about 5 minutes deciding on the approach to use and then the typing started.

I wouldn’t have been able to write the code as quickly as it was being knocked out, but I could understand it. And although we were all talking there were no arguments and we pushed through and got a working program done (with one easily fixed bug) just in time. Although not strictly pair programming, I can see why that approach can generate quality code quickly.

But that wasn’t it. Each team demoed their solution and showed their code. This was just as useful as writing the program in the first place. Because we had all been thinking about the same problem it was easy to understand the different approaches that were presented. There were class based solutions as well as functional ones (some had tests!) and we even saw the major development environments – Macs running vi, Linux machines with Emacs, and Notepad++ on Windows. We also saw a solution using Python3.

I enjoyed this more than I expected. It was nice to be able to contribute even though I’m not that experienced with Python, and I learned plenty just by watching and asking questions. It was a welcoming bunch and I will certainly be going again. And this time I’ll pay more attention to people’s names.

I don’t think anybody used version control, though…

Download the Keynote presentation (1.1 Mb)

Download the Slides as a PDF file (1.7 Mb)