afongen

This one’s for you, Mike. From chromatic’s wrap-up of OSCON day 3:

Brian Aker, fresh on his new job as Senior Architect at MySQL, shocked the world (or, at least, me) when he announced that he’d embedded Perl in MySQL and was using it for stored procedures a couple of years ago. Of course, it did segfault rather often. Fortunately, it’s highly mature now. In his talk on “Making MySQL Do More”, Brian showed the embedded function API. You can write new functions for MySQL in Perl, Python, PHP, and Java. (Keep asking him about Ruby.) You can link to C libraries; he’s used Image Magick and zlib.

Oh my god.

I’m not at OSCON this year, and man am I bummed. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been trying to keep up on what people have been writing. Phil Windley‘s been doing some great session summaries. Jeremy Zawodny, of course, and many over at use perl;. Don’t forget the OSCON wiki and the official page. Only a few people seem to have picked up on the trackback URLs (see the conference grid), which is a damn shame: last year’s trackback page over on movabletype.org was really useful, and by now more people are familiar with the concept. it would help to follow the goings-on.

It’s going to take me a while to sort through everything. Probably just as well, it’ll give me something to do while I’m musing about how I’m going to go next year.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of public key encryption is that it’s just too damn hard. Even smart, tech-savvy people take a while to wrap their brains around it, and that’s only if they think it’s worth their time. If people don’t already think that crypto is important (i.e. “I have nothing to hide”), why invest the time and energy in trying to understand it, much less learning to use the software?

Identity-based encryption may help.

IBE greatly simplifies the key management process. When Alice sends a message to Bob, she encrypts the message using Bob’s public key. What’s Bob’s public key? His email address. Note that Bob never had to set up a public key and Alice never needed to look it up. When Bob receives the encrypted message, he contacts a key server to get his private key so he can decrypt the message. He can store this key locally so he can reuse it.

Very cool.

A new company, Voltage Security, is having a go at selling software that uses IBE. See that site for a better write-up of the idea. It looks like they’re still filling out the product line, so it’s a bit early to comment. But how can I not?

• I’m not clear how those outside a corporate/university environment will get their keys, unless someone sets up fee-based or free key servers. Which is likely.
• I hope to see software for non-Windows platforms.
• It would be grand to see open IBE implementations. Hey look: Stanford distributes code!
• I’m not sure whether this can be used for digital signatures.

Ah, it’s raining. And I’ve got to catch a bus. Nothing like a tall guy standing out in the open in a thunderstorm, holding a metal rod in the air.

Congratulations, Gary, Jana, and Addie.

• Edweblogs.org: NECC 2003, a weblog set up for the National Education Computing Conference.
• OSCON wiki.
• Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. “Persistent patterns in long-lived online groups.”
• Scholars Who Blog.

Stanford University has released the code for its CourseWork course management system under an open source license.

I took some time off this week to spend with my sister and her son, who were in town for the holiday. We went to the Aboretum, the Children’s Museum, walked through some woods along the Mississippi River, hit a couple parks, went swimming… the usual. It was a lot of fun, and boy am I wiped out. Might take me a while to catch up with some things I want to write here.

The Nephew is an outgoing, energetic little boy. It’s really an effort keeping up with him; luckily the rest of us outnumber him and can take turns. What really amazed me is just how extroverted he is. Watching him engage people in conversation is draining. Yesterday at the lake, I found myself wanting to call him back from talking to someone or other (“stop bothering the nice man”) but realized that my sister — although watching carefully — seemed content to let him chat away. It struck me that my discomfort with his behavior was not caused by any concern that he was talking with strangers (he was, after all, closely observed by three responsible adult relatives) but rather the fact that I would never be that outgoing. Ever. And I have trouble imagining that anyone would be.

I asked my mother if I or any of my siblings had ever been that extroverted. Nope. Not all of us combined.

So I wonder: what if my son is an extrovert? I know that the difference between introversion and extroversion is rooted in chemistry, so it’s a distinct possibility. What would it take for me to deal with an extroverted kid? I’m exhausted after just a few days with The Nephew. And how well will I be able to judge what is genuinely inappropriate/impolite behavior as opposed to just something that makes me uncomfortable because I would never do it?

Punt, I suppose.

I just saw a television ad for PDF. Weird.

Just like the title says: Netscape 7.1 has been released, as has Mozilla 1.4. So far, using Netscape 7.1 on Windows doesn’t force me into all sorts of preference-resetting contortions when I quit and go back to Mozilla. Happy day.

No, I don’t use Firebird on Windows. I eventually will, I’m sure, but so far just don’t have a compelling need to do so. On OS X, on the other hand, I do prefer Firebird to the full-blown Mozilla package. At least for development, which is all that I use it for anymore on my Macs. Safari has become my default browser.