dreid.org

Below is a simple python script for generating a reading list appropriate for use with blogofile from a GoodReads RSS Feeds. It divides the list into 2 sections Read and Reading (from the "read" and "currently-reading" shelves)

You can get the necessary config variables from the following feed URL found on your currently-reading shelf view.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/{{GOOD_READS_ID}}?key={{GOOD_READS_KEY}}&shelf=currently-reading

The script also includes gets the links for the list from goodreads as amazon affiliate links.

Reading List

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 06:18:04 PST

Read

Reading

Follow me at goodreads!

Importing blogger into blogofile

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:43:00 PST

I couldn't find any thing of this type, so I wrote a very quick python script to do an import of my blogger into my blogofile, preserving categories, and permalinks.

Running it is pretty straight forward. Takes a single argument which is the URL to your blogger atom feed.

Why I still trust Tor, WikiLeaks, and Jacob Appelbaum.

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:58:00 PST

I feel compelled to comment on Zed Shaw's recent "analysis" of an apparent conflict of interest concerning Tor developer and WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum.

If you don't know what I'm talking about you should start by reading Why I Don't Use Tor

I'm going to try to not be too "logical" in my argument because apparently that will cause my argument to be inherently flawed. So instead I'm going to try to mix emotion with logic in what I hope will not be too volatile a cocktail for this blog post to contain.

I've met Jacob Appelbaum multiple times, mostly through our mutual friend Zooko of "Zooko's Triangle" and Tahoe-LAFS fame. He seems like a great guy, nice, smart, funny, and passionate about personal privacy. It was his demo of Tor on Android over cheap Korean BBQ which convinced me to give up my iPhone.

I've also met Zed Shaw. He was abrasive, and seemed offended that I did not recognize him as "Zed 'Mother-Fucking' Shaw" but who knows, maybe that was just his schtick.

The above linked post is not what I would consider a classic example of trolling. I believe that Zed Shaw probably believes the things he's written there and that's fine. I'm not one to judge people's other personal beliefs, however his argument seems flawed not only because he bases partly on a well known-rumor that has been repeatedly denied while no evidence has ever been offered for it. But also because it makes certain assumptions which I'm not convinced are valid. 3 to be exact.

1) Jacob Appelbaum is in a position to drastically impact the security of Tor.

Yes, and no. He is certainly qualified, and what little I know of the project's organization he seems to be in a position where he could make decisions which could impact Tor's security. However Tor is an open code base, freely available for anyone to audit and not the work of one lone programmer. This does not mean that everyone is qualified to audit the code, I'm certainly not, however I think enough people care about personal privacy and anonymity that qualified individuals are looking at it.

2) WikiLeaks' job would be easier if an insecure Tor were in widespread use.

I don't think it would be. As far as I know, there is no evidence to suggest that information obtained by WikiLeaks has ever come from a source other than a conventional whistleblower. A person with some level of access to certain information decides that it is right, just, or worth 15 minutes of fame to leak some information. If Bradley Manning leaked those diplomatic cables, and that collateral murder video he probably didn't have legitimate access to that information, but he also didn't obtain it by setting up a rogue Tor exit node. He had legitimate access to military networks.

On a second point, in a future where Tor usage is widespread, I would also expect that you would see Tor Hidden Services also be widespread and any organization hoping to insure anonymity and privacy to their users would be better off running one of those than a normal website that users could access by Tor.

3) WikiLeaks' job would be harder if a secure Tor were in widespread use.

I hope so, but probably not sufficiently so that it would be worth risking both Tor and WikiLeaks' reputations to do so. On the off chance that an oppressive regime or a major corporation used Tor for all their most dirty little secrets it's still more likely that the heavily bearded sysadmin in Reeboks and a Fedora would take that information and leak it than some hacker or even enemy government or corporation would steal it.

Of course, these 3 points only matter if you're willing to completely ignore the fact that Tor and WikiLeaks' interests do not actually conflict. WikiLeaks does not appear to be interested in posting the latest celebrity sex tape or pictures from Miley Cyrus' Facebook page.

In conclusion I think it's far more likely that Zed Shaw wanted to get some hackernews juice by blogging about WikiLeaks than it is that Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange want to read your email.

Mimicing source virtualenv/bin/activate in Emacs.

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:39:00 PST

For a while now I've had a problem where at work we rely heavily on virtualenv and I occasionally want to do things like run pyflakes or run trial from the Twisted installed in that virtualenv. This following activate-virtualenv function appears to be all that is necessary to mimic source virtualenv/bin/activate for Emacs. Enjoy.

I don't write here much anymore…

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:01:00 PST

My attempt to start writing again which led to switching to blogger as a platform has kind of failed. I also discovered I don't like blogger as a platform which led to me not writing very because it was an annoying task to actually get a well formatted post entered into the blog-o-drome.

I've also been going through some things. You can read about them here but I must you warn you that the writing is very unpolished.

I'm only really updating this because I saw that it was recently linked to from Twisted Matrix Laboratories. It might even be that the post I'm currently writing will get syndicated on Planet Twisted. I just didn't want people to click that link and be disappointed when they saw some lame posts from 6 months ago.

Eventually I'd like to get into Twisted development and start writing more about Twisted but I just don't have it in me right now.