Scott… Sit down and shut up!

This could be bad in so many ways…

Archive for May, 2005

Thunderbird is thunderbust?

May 16th, 2005

Well, I am at the end of being able to function with Thunderbird…

I love this program… the customizable looks, the extensions, the features, the security (adaptive SPAM filtering is very nice in TB)… all really good. But, here’s my dilemma; the calendar (Mozilla Calendar) is not integrated properly and there is no way to sync it with a palm-pilot. I have had the calendar blow-up at least 3 times… and for some reason, this time seems to be for good. I can no longer create or import any entries and the program seems hosed. I suppose this is just a user problem (more like a Winblows problem), but for me, all that matters is that I can’t get the thing to work, and even when it does, it doesn’t have the functionality I need.

Before everyone goes and tells me there is a palm-sync extension out there, they need to check out what it is really for… all it does is sync Palm’s address book.

Frankly, for mail… there’s nothing I would rather be using. But because the calendar is not integrated, there is no way for me to keep track of who emails what invites to which meetings if I simply use it for mail. I would end up having to use something else and import the invites into that anyways… so that doesn’t really solve my requirements.

On the plus, everyone in my company is using it, along with Mozilla calendar… they publish their calendars to a webdav server and we can all see what we’re doing. I guess I am going to be on the outside for a while because I feel it’s more important for me to have a sync’d calendar than for everyone else to be able to see it.

Being a consultant, I live by my calendar. So if a meeting isn’t in my calendar, it might as well not be scheduled. Not being able to sync my calendar with my Palm (integrated into my phone) makes both my Palm and the calendaring software useless.

There’s a lot to be said for open-source development, but the lack of progress in this area is very disheartening. Until they get calendar, whether it is Mozilla calendar, or Sunbird, fully integrated into Thunderbird, it is pretty-much useless to me.

I am going to make the painful switch back to Microsloth LookOut and do all my own calendar scheduling on a local machine just so I can sync with my Palm.

�Scott Keoseyan – 16 MAY 05

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Posted in Applications, Personal, Technology

Your pappers puhleeze…

May 11th, 2005

Well, after writing both my senators this past spring, I was disturbed to hear that the RealID Act of 2005 passed the Senate yesterday with a 100-0 unanimous decision. Apparently it was attached to the Iraq war funding measure… and any Senator worth their salt wasn’t going to come off looking like they didn’t support the troops; so it passed.

I normally don’t go crazy paranoid about laws that the government passes, but some of the language in this provision is so out of line with basic constitutional rights, it’s not even funny.

Let’s start with the obvious… if you don’t have a complying identification, how are you going to be treated when you go to the airport? Will you even be allowed on the airplane? What happens if you don’t show a proper or complying ID when travelling. These questions are real, mainly because the bill made no provision for who would pay for the implementation of this law; leaving it up to the states to decide. So… basically, 50 individual entities are now responsible for implmentation of a set of rules that they are not receiving any funding on.

Then there’s the old “withholding of federal highway funds” for states who fail to comply. Right… so now when a state doesn’t want to participate in a program that’s been shoved down their throats, they get extorted into compliance…

Being from North Carolina, I am wondering how long it will be before I can’t leave the state, because my state is going to be one of the last to achieve compliance, due to both recalcitrance and lack of funding. I mean, I doubt I am going to have a standardized ID card issued to me anytime soon, so I guess when the drooling moron at the TSA gate in the airport looks my ID and boarding pass over, they’re not going to let me on the plane.

Here’s the text from my letter to both Senator Dole and Senator Hatch that I wrote this past spring… I received no response:

I read today that the house has passed the Real ID Act of 2005, HR 418. As a fellow Republican, I am certain that you can appreciate the fact that this bill is repugnant in both its methods and decisive in its actions to remove some very basic freedoms which both states and individuals rely on. When this bill is brought before the senate, as a constituent, I urge you to please vote against this bill.

Specifically, the clause barring judicial review of actions taken (once adopted as a law), and the linking of federal highway funds to participation in the programs stipulated by this bill, are unacceptable stipulations.

I heard a quote made by some of the congressmen yesterday stating that some of the 9/11 terrorists had valid IDs. I do not understand how the presence of a law such as this would have allowed anyone at the airport from keeping these terrorists from boarding an airplane. In fact, from what I can tell, none of the terrorists were even attempting to disguise who they were when they committed these acts. This is not one of key their methods of operation.

Taking rights away from the states, the way that this act if passed, will do, is totally unacceptable. DMVs have traditionally been under the purview of the states. Mandating how the states will operate their DMVs is just another attempt by the Federal government to seize powers granted to the states by the US Constitution. Federal withholding of highways funds is tantamount to extortion.

Allowing the department of Homeland Security to take actions under this law, and not allowing those actions to be subject to any sort of review or claim defies and circumvents the US Constitution and can lead to potential violation of both state and individual rights with no recourse or protection.

Again, when this bill makes its way to the Senate, please vote against it.

So, I guess we’d better get ready for that famous phrase we used to joke Eastern Europeans about… your papers please…

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Posted in General, Personal, Social

Improvements on the system… SSL/TLS

May 3rd, 2005

A while ago I wrote about how I built out a LAMPS box. One of the things I had not figured out how to do was enable secure mail transactions via IMAP and SMTP. Well, that has changed, and now I’ve got that turned on too.

Wasn’t too hard to do either… I self-signed my certs, reconfigured postfix and cyrus, opened the right ports, and it was active. I just finished doing an Ethereal capture and it all looks good, meaning that I can’t see a thing other than it’s TLS data during the transactions.

One of the gotchas was that because I have SASL authenticating through PAM, and PAM hooks to LDAP, there is no way to do encrypted passwords for SMTP auth. I don’t view this as a big problem though since, according to the Ethereal capture I took, the password is transmitted after I establish the tunnel.

Same goes for IMAP. Apparently Secure Password Authentication (SPA) isn’t going to work, however, since the password is transmitted within the TLS tunnel, it’s secure. Apparently the reason for this incompatibility with LDAP has to do with the way the passwords are stored.

Here’s a pretty good URL for instructions on how to configure Postfix for TLS support: