Personal Pages John's Page [mugshot]

E-mail

Unless you encrypt an e-mail message it is no more private than a post card. There are two e-mail encryption systems in common use: PGP and S/MIME. My PGP public keys:

  • Old (RSA)
  • New (DSA/ElGamal) (preferred)
    •

    If you are writing to me, please send a simple, plain-text message or a multipart message with attachments I can actually use; otherwise it stands a good chance of being junked, along with spam. (Very little e-mail these days is structured without attachments.)

    My guidelines provide more details about this policy.

    State of the Planet

    The state of planet Earth (from our parochial human viewpoint) is not good. This summary opinion of mine is further explored in:

    Gripes

    No three-button optical mice. Mice with clickable scroll wheels don't count: the wheel makes a lousy middle button. The first mouse I used, back in the eighties, was a three-button optical mouse from Sun. (It required a special mouse pad, unlike today's optical mice.) When I later had to use a mouse with a rolling ball I considered that a step backwards. After cleaning the fuzz out of my mouse yet again, I did a web search for three-button optical mice. No luck. There were wheel mice galore, but no honest-to-goodness three-button mice. I also discovered that I'm not the only one with this gripe; one of the first hits was Peter da Silva's "Where are all the three button mice?", in which he explains why we would want such creatures. (I now use an optical mouse with a scroll wheel even though the wheel is a poor excuse for a button; for scrolling the wheel is fine, though I sometimes find I have accidentally pressed it while scrolling and inadvertently pasted the selection where it was not wanted.)

    Web pages that require JavaScript but don't let you know. I usually browse with JavaScript turned off. Pages that only work (or only work well) with JavaScript fail mysteriously in various ways or are blank. It's very easy to include text shown only to those not using JavaScript that says something like "This page requires JavaScript. Please enable it." Unfortunately, that simple act of courtesy is all too rare.

    Computers

    I have been hacking around on computers for a long time.

    The first computer I ever used, MISTIC, had vacuum tubes. Input and output was by paper tape, written on tape punches, and printed with a tape reader attached to a real teletype machine. Numbers were entered in hexadecimal using Illiac Paper Tape Format (see Dead Media: Paper Tape) with the extra digits being K,S,N,J,F,L instead of the now customary A,B,C,D,E,F.

    Since those ancient times, I have used Control Data and Cray mainframes and various smaller machines. I have had computers of my own since 1981.

    I have been using various flavors of UNIX since 1987. At home, up until 1996, I used DOS: first DOS 3.3 (from Apple) and then DOS 3.10 (from Microsoft). When I finally got around to getting a computer that could run something more complex than MS-DOS, I installed Linux on it, rather than be forced to use Windows, which still to this day I find to be inscrutable and infuriating. In case you think I am completely biased against Microsoft products, let me say that I rather liked Applesoft Basic. (And Bill Gates is not without redeeming features: after all, he is left-handed.)

    Some of the software I use may be of general interest.

    Etc.

    I have a brief résumé (PDF, 37 KB), if you are interested in looking at it.

    This page is, as is often said on the web, "under construction", so look for other topics here as I find time to write them up.