Wednesday, December 30, 2009

End-of-Year Miscellanea

I haven't posted too much lately. Here and there I have been working on a few interesting projects; I continue to add little bits of functionality to Antichrist Watch and have added dojox.gfx vector graphics to a handful of sites (including among others NEARTA, Keep Saugus A Town, and Shining Stars Learning Center). Using dojox.gfx vector graphics is really interesting; it enables the sizing of elements within a site to be completely based on em size and/or window size without significant increase in load times or loss of graphical clarity. My svg2gfx.xslt utility was recently promoted to Dojo proper (in time for the 1.4 release), too, and this should hopefully make creating dojox.gfx graphics a bit simpler for some. I'll try to write something up describing the general process of making a vector image logo for a site in the relative near future. I've also been messing around with getting egg-based builds of Zope 2 and Plone working under Repoze with varying degrees of success. I don't have a solid, simple enough solution for either of these to post much of anything yet.

I've also spent a not-insignificant time lately messing around with e-mail. I've been using Apple's Mail.app for awhile now, and whenever I've needed encryption I've simply used its built-in S/MIME capabilities. With a free Thawte client certificate, it was extremely easy to set up and just worked everywhere. As you're probably aware, Thawte recently dropped its free certificate service. This meant that I had to change my ways. The simplest path was to start using the free CAcert service for client certificates and instruct those with whom I'd already been communicating via S/MIME to pull in the appropriate root certificates. I did this fairly painlessly (although I still have to hunt around for some locals willing to vouch for my ID; if you're in the North-of-Boston area and willing to do so, please drop me a line). As I'll be working more closely with the SitePen folks though in the near future and they all use PGP I wanted to get it working as well. Sadly, Mail.app does not have the nice built-in support for PGP that it does for S/MIME; to make matters worse, the GPGMail plug-in to give Mail.app PGP capabilities isn't quite yet ready for the current version of Mail.app. There are some unofficial releases available through the forums, and I got the newest of these to work. Thus I now (finally) have both S/MIME and PGP signing & encryption working for my e-mail. (Although I also have to hunt around for locals to sign my PGP key; if you're in the North-of-Boston area and willing to do so, please drop me a line.)