On GPG/PGP Keys...

Way back in 2010, I attended the GSoC Mentors Summit. I thought that would be a perfect time to get a new GPG key signed by a lot of people. Unfortunately, I decided to do this the night before flying out to Mountain View. With the lack of sleep, long flight, and busy weekend, I promptly forgot the passphrase to that key.

For quite a while, I tried to remember or somehow guess the passphrase, to no avail. I even wrote a Python script to try out combinations of fragments I thought might be in it. Alas, I had no success.¹

Since I just attended another Mentors Summit this past weekend, I had no choice but to come up with a new key. The new key ID is 0x8D86E7FA E5EB0C10 and eventually it will accumulate some signatures from the event as I go through them. The old key, 0xACA35FE6, really didn't have too many signatures², so I guess it's no great loss.

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1 Okay, I realize you have no way of trusting this statement if you've already trusted the old key, but I can't really do anything about that anymore.^↩

2 At least you can check this statement on the keyservers, though.^↩

Fun at the GSoC Mentors Summit

Last weekend was the GSoC Mentors Summit. As a mentor for the Pidgin, Finch and libpurple project, I attended for the first time this year.

It was pretty interesting and a lot of fun, but I have to say I didn't really feel like much of a geek there! Everyone's either got an iPhone or a Droid, and they've all done awesome stuff. Can you say you've worked on WordPress, used by millions of websites, or Apache, serving even more websites, or RTEMS, running several space exploration instruments and other consumer products, or who knows what else?

Nevertheless, it wasn't like I was totally unknown. There were quite a few people who use Pidgin, even one or two using Finch. Oh, and some Mac users using Adium (using libpurple), too.

The flight was fine, but the weather was a bit disappointed. It would have been nicer to explore a bit more, but at least I got to eat a ton of chocolate. I'll try and write a longer re-cap later.

Mentoring a student for GSoC

So last week the accepted proposals for GSoC were announced. Pidgin was given 4 slots.

First up, we have Ivan Komarov working on improving ICQ. I don't really use ICQ, so I can't say much, but if you do, hopefully there'll be a lot of great things coming out of it that will be useful to you. Next up is Adam Fowler working on a better chat log viewer. People really seem to complain about what we have now and at the very least, it's kind of slow once you have a lot of logs, so there should be room for some good improvements there. And then we have Gilles Bedel working on detachable libpurple sessions. I'm not sure how often I'd use it, but every once in a while, I feel like checking in on Pidgin from the laptop and it's a very painful process through SSH and D-Bus. This project should make that sort of thing much simpler. Finally, we have Jorge Villaseñor Salinas working on refactoring MSN.

So that last one is the one I'm mentoring. Personally, I've been wanting to re-write bits and pieces of the MSN prpl for a while now, but I've never had the time to get around to it. Jorge's already done some great work getting custom smiley support working for Pidgin 2.5.0. I'm sure he'll have no problem re-working the MSN prpl. I'm looking forward to getting a more structured and (hopefully) well-designed prpl which should make development a lot easier and quicker.