notes from Ken

A post on ‘tool cruft’ — brain space and loyalty tied up by old tools that you have learned so well it’s hard to let them go for a minute to look around to see if anything better is out there.

I upgraded to the latest (v1.0) Thunderbird, installed Enigmail and GPG. For the first time ever for me, getting encryption working in a GUI mail client Just Worked. I still have nobody to exchange encrypted mail with.

More articulate description over at dirtSimple. I have so felt his pain. Douglas Englebart, who led the development of the first word processor in the 1960′s, tried to explain what word processing would be like to people who had never used a word processor. “Imagine a pencil,” he would say. (I’m paraphrasing liberally here, by [...]

My post about Twisted and wxPython was being confounded by WordPress’s too-clever munging of my code pastes. I don’t know what the best way to handle this was, but a lot of rooting around and trying to fix it without touching code was met with failure. So I installed this enscript-using plugin and then hacked [...]

I’ve been experimenting with both wxPython and Twisted. wxPython is a GUI toolkit and Twisted is a network programming framework. … but the example for using them together results in CPU-spinning polling….

Dreamhost recently started offering quick, automated set-up for WordPress. I decided to try it out. I used their “web panel” to set up this subdomain and then to install WordPress on it. Everything went very smoothly. WordPress appears to be more polished than Moveable Type was the last time I installed or used it in [...]

A few months ago I decided to sign up for webhosting. I wanted a high-bandwidth place to share photos from since the upstream on consumer DSL service is still not very good. I talked to some friends on Waterpoint decided to go with Dreamhost. I’m using Dreamhost’s Code Monster package. That’s where this is hosted [...]