*scottstuff*

Bruce Schneier says that the President has declared a national emergency and used it to extend the US export controls on cryptography. Apparently this happens every few years; Bush and Clinton have both done it.

As the article says, crypto exports really are a lot easier then they were in the ’90s, but there are still issues. We’ve had to deal with some of them at work, and it felt like a total throwback to days past–we need to file paperwork with the government before we can ship crypto software to Europe? Even though we’re just using the standard set of open-source crypto tools that we probably downloaded from Europe in the first place?

At least we didn’t actually need approval–just notification. It’s a step in the right direction, and no one’s actually afraid that the US will completely ban encryption tools anymore. That was a real fear for a while in the ’90s.

The new pricing for Movable Type (the software that runs this blog, along with a zillion others) is out. The previous release was free for non-commercial use. The new release is free–if you only have one author and fewer then 3 blogs. Any more then that, and you need to pay. The cheapest license is $99, marked down to $69 for the moment, and that only covers 3 authors. For commercial users, pricing starts at $299 (on sale now–only $199) for 5 authors, and goes up to $699 ($599) for 20 authors/15 blogs.

Needless to say, this is causing a bit of an uproar, and a lot of people are looking at switching from MT to other systems.

I guess I’m probably one of them. I’ve been half-heartedly looking for a different system for a while, but my needs are kind of unusual (as usual :-). Here’s a short list of what I’m looking for:

• Simple, customizable blog engine, supports RSS and Atom, as well as at least one API supported by Ecto and NetNewsWire’s editor. Atom API support would be nice, but not all that critical, since I don’t have an Atom-aware editor yet.
• Trackback and comment support. Preferably threaded. I actually like the concept behind Six Apart’s TypeKey, but that’s too much to ask, probably.
• Support for non-blog pages. Take a look at http://svn.scottstuff.net for an example. Most of the pages are auto-generated, but I’d like to be able to share the template with my blog, and it’d be nice to be able to use the same comment engine.
• Support for the Markdown markup language. I’ve found it to me vastly easier to work with then writing raw XHTML. That’s not to say that HTML is hard, but Markdown really lowers the amount of effort required.
• Decent comment-spam tools. Admittedly, most comment spam is keyed to MT’s comment system, but that’ll change.
• Tools for converting from MT. I don’t mind spending a bit of time on this, and I only have 190-ish posts here, but I’m not throwing them away, and it’d be nice to save the comments and trackbacks, too.
• A photo gallery system that doesn’t suck. Since I haven’t found one that doesn’t suck yet, this is a difficult requirement. My goal is to be able to maintain one big master index in iView MediaPro on my Mac, and then sync the pictures and metadata onto my server from time to time, mostly using rsync and xml. Then, I want an automated script to pre-render thumbnails (on-demand thumbnails of 6 MP images are too slow for my poor server) and lay everything out. I’m currently using Album, but I’m not particularly fond of it. It just works better then anything else I’ve used. Systems that require manual, non-scriptable uploading of individual images need not apply.
• A semi-integrated Wiki’d be nice, but I doubt I’d use it any time soon.
• It needs to be scriptable and easy to enhance. Ideally, it’d be written in a language that I’m comfortable with; Ruby’d be best, and Perl’s okay. I can cope with Python and PHP, but I don’t really like either. A decent XML RPC/SOAP/REST interface would be nice, too.

If anyone has any suggestions, please leave comments. I suspect I’ll hear at least one recommendation for Drupal, but it’d be nice to hear other suggestions too. Can Drupal handle semi-static non-blog pages easily?

TheFeature.com has an interesting article on Intel’s new ”Jabberwockey” research project. In short, it’s a bluetooth-driven system for recognizing “familiar strangers” via their phones. It runs on your phone and keeps track of other bluetooth devices that it sees, so it can recognize when those devices show up in other contexts.

Personally, I find this kind of fascinating. I don’t see the present incarnation as being particularly useful, but I love the concept. If you had a bit longer range then Bluetooth (30 feet is kind of short, 100-150 feet would be just about right, IMHO), and some reasonably standard way of mapping device IDs to people (think FOAF or something Technorati- or Google-driven, where people opt-in by posting their own IDs), and we could have a really fascinating way of building communities. There are certainly a ton of privacy issues, but those could be mostly mitigated by the opt-in nature of the device ID→identity mapping and by turning off Bluetooth discovery on your phone.

I tend to write lots of little scripts and tools for my own personal use, but I very rarely share them. The main reason for this is that it’s a pain to share things–I need to set up infrastructure for storing the source, and some way of generating web pages, and then I need to tell people about the software. It’s a pain.

On the other hand, I have a bunch of Asterisk stuff sitting around that I strongly suspect people would find interesting. I’d like to share it, but the barrier to sharing tends to make it more of a pain then it’s worth for small stuff.

So, I broke down and wrote some infrastructure. It’s not perfect, but it’s easy to use. I have a publicly readable Subversion server at http://svn.scottstuff.net. The tree itself is available in the public directory; there’s also a ViewCVS interface lurking there; see the front page for details. Each project in the Subversion tree will get a page in the /project directory automatically, with the README file auto-converted to HTML. Parts of this are still a bit spotty, and I need to add some menus, but the basic framework is there, it works, and it’s basically trivial to use.

Mark Bernstein, the author of Tinderbox, took a bit of offense yesterday when I called Tinderbox slow.

Okay, first of all, it’s kind of crazy to compare NetNewsWire and Tinderbox. They’re utterly different programs, with different purposes and different goals. It’s kind of like comparing Excel and Safari because you can do math with either of them. Tinderbox is a unique brainstorming/organizational tool, and NetNewsWire is an RSS reader. You can use either of them for writing blogs, though.

Now, here’s my main problem with Tinderbox for blogging (I really hate that word): I’m already running NetNewsWire 95% of the time. It’s easier to pop up its editor then it is to start up Tinderbox. Unless Tinderbox wants to become an RSS reader (yeah, I know that it can import RSS, but that’s not exactly the same thing to me; I don’t see it tracking what I’ve already read), it’s going to lose this battle.

But, the first 20 or so posts here were written with Tinderbox, before I started using NetNewsWire. Before that, I maintained a work to-do blog with it; its powerful searching and sorting abilities were really useful there. So, here’s my other problem with Tinderbox: it’s text entry box is slow after I get 5 or 6 paragraphs in it. In less then a screenful of text, it’s too slow to keep up with my typing, and after that it just gets slower and slower. This is with Tinderbox 2.0 under assorted versions of Jaguar on a 550 MHz PowerBook. It’s not the zippiest laptop around, but it’s not a complete slug. On the document that holds my weblog, I can easily get it down to 2-3 characters per second in either Explorer or Outline views.

Strangely, on a new, blank document, doesn’t exhibit this slowdown. I’m not sure what’s up, my weblog is only a 140K Tinderbox document. I’ll take Mr. Bernstein’s advice and visit the Tinderbox techsupport page and see what I can do to speed it up later today.

But, even once we’ve worked through the speed problem, I’m still going to use NetNewsWire for writing here. And that’s okay; different tools for different jobs. Tinderbox is still really nice for organizing other types of information. If you haven’t seen it, then you’re missing out; it’s one of the most original programs that I’ve seen in a while.

I finally broke down and bought NetNewsWire. I’m really impressed with how well it works for reading RSS feeds; it’s really changed the way I read news sites online. Since I’ve been doing things more or less the same way for years (I think tabbed browsing is the only major change since at least 1997), that’s quite an accomplishment.

I’ve also started to use it for writing; I was using Tinderbox, and while it’s absolutely an interesting program, it’s not quite what I want for writing here. Plus, it was getting really slow when editing long-ish chunks of text.