12.23.06

3D Google

Posted in Commentary, OSX Software at 9:49 pm by hackamac

Google has some neat 3D software called “Google Sketchup” which ties in with Google Earth. SketchUp is software that used to be a commercial application but now there is a free version and for charge version called SketchUp Pro. One of the coolest items is that you can take a screen from Google Earth and then click a button in SketchUp to import the map into SketchUp. Now you can build your 3D model on the google map including applying a JPEG image as “texture” to the sides so you can see the entire building in 3D. And of course, it all works in OSX.

There is a series of podcasts that covers this application and many more. It is called “Macbreak” and the show about Sketchup is number 32. If you are not watching Macbreak, you should be. They always have cool stuff on it and numbers 29 and 30 are how they shoot and edit the show. You can pick up some excellent tips and techniques watching this. I have picked up tips for several cool applications by watching this show. You can find it on iTunes and subscribe to it.

Christmas was fun as always and Santa brought me two gigs of memory for my Intel Mini which was suffering running only a single gig. Boy how times have changed. I remember when 256 K was considered ALOT of RAM and that was only DRAM. Of course, my C64 had a whopping 64K of RAM which blew most of the boxes in that time into the weeds. The “ancient” crap at work had core memory and only 32K which was made of 16K banks and a paper tape reader Some call those the golden years but overall, I disagree. The quality of software and hardware we have today is lightyears ahead of what we had back then. I will admit that it was alot of fun and a small and more intimate group of people back then. We have certainly lost the sense of community that I remember and it was certainly not MySpace. It was alot of fun then in many ways. But I look at my Macs today and even my Linux and Windows boxen and I have to say things have gotten easier in many regards. Not to say that things could not stand some improvement, they always can but I am saying not to forget our collective roots and remember that it used to take hours to load a small program and hours to download the smallest utility assuming you could find it and did not have to write it yourself.

For some good reading, find a copy of iWoz and give it a go.

iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

I got mine from Audible.com as a audible book and it was very enjoyable. Woz comes across in some respects, very arrogant but truth be told, he was and is as smart as he thinks he is. I suspect many of geeks can relate to the issues of being smarter than most around you and yet, none listening to you because you were too young, too different or just not able to dumb down your knowledge enough for the unwashed masses to get a clue. Woz had many interesting experiences that I went, “yeah, I remember that ”or “I remember feeling that way” or in some cases “damn, if only I were born just a year or two sooner”. I was on the tail end of alot of what he talked about around the mid 70s and I regret not being able to be in the thick of some of it. But, I did manage to be in alot fo the pre-dotcom, the dotcom and watch it all implode quite spectacularly. So I have to say, I missed some things but not all of it. It was very interesting to get an insiders view of things I only had a window seat to like the start up of Apple and how the Apple II came about. Or how things shifted with Steve and Woz over the years. I have to say that it sounds like Woz did alot of growing up over the years in spite of himself and that I think in the end, he has turned out to be a pretty decent human even with his wealth and talents. Not everyone can keep their sense of self in the face of extreme wealth and the idea that you are smarter than most. Just look at the ship of fools at Enron. Smart people every one of them and yet they all fell hard in the end. Anyways, give it a read, it is not too long or boring and I found it to be enjoyable.

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12.10.06

Keys and Ciphers

Posted in Commentary, OSX Software, OSX Technical at 9:27 am by hackamac

Ciphers have been used since the earliest days of Egypt (found as early as 1900BC) and have evolved over the years to ciphers that are nigh unbreakable even by the NSA and their supercomputers. A cipher is just the device or algorithm used to encrypt the data that you want to keep private. There are many ciphers such as DES, 3DES, AES, BLOWFISH, IDEA and more. This blog entry is not meant to be a treatise on cipher design or even an in-depth discussion on encryption. I just want to give an overview of a set of tools available to the OSX user that provides decent encryption and an easy way to use it. So to that end, I will explain a few terms and concepts and then I will over GPG and some nice GUI tools for OSX to use with GPG.

There are some key terms to know for Public Key Infrastructure or PKI.

• Private Key – This is one half of the pair of keys used in PKI and the one key that is NEVER given out to anyone. You can protect this key by using an expiration date and/or a passphrase.
• Public Key – This is the second half of the PKI and this is the one key that you CAN give out to anyone or even place on a keyserver for anyone to use to send you encrypted or signed files.
• Hash – Hashing is a method of taking a piece of data and generating a mathematical checksum from it using a hashing algorithm such as MD5 or Message Digest 5.
• RSA – RSA or Rivest, Shamir and Alderman is a public key cipher both to encrypt and digitally sign data.
• DSA – DSA or Digital Signing Algorithm is also a public key cipher but only used to digitally sign data, not encrypt.
• AES – AES or Advanced Encryption Standard and is symmetrical and intended to replace DES.
• IDEA – IDEA or International Data Encryption Algorithm is a “drop in” replacement for DES.
• DES – DES and 3DES are both Data Encryption Standard which was designed in 1976 and is in widespread use today. It was thought to relatively secure but with the advent of low cost personal computers and distributed computing, it was proven to b e easily cracked.
• SHA – SHA or Secure Hash Algorithm comes in two version, version 1 and 2. SHA is intended to be a replacement for MD5.

Now that you know some terms, lets hit some light history of Cryptography. I mentioned earlier that the Egyptians so far have the record of the earliest known use of ciphers. Julius Caesar used a simple substitution method of encryption to protect his messages in Rome. Our own Thomas Jefferson in 1790 developed a cipher wheel that was actually used by the US Navy in WWII. In the late 20s and early 30s, the FBI had to establish an office for the combating of Rum runners using ciphers and encryption in their illicit business. In 1976, DES was introduced to the world and in 1977, RSA was introduced to the world in Scientific American Magazine and the Feds promptly flipped out over it. Apparently it was just ok for the Feds to have encryption and not the common man. That battle is still raging today with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) which had the Feds sue the inventor, Phil Zimmermann, for trafficking in munitions (they lost in the end). We now have the free version of PGP called GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). And GPG is what we care about today on our Macs.

What we need to do first is get the packages or the source files for GPG. There are several DMG files to find that will make your life much easier. Before we do anything, we have to install GPG on our Mac. We can get it here. Once you have downloaded it (I am assuming here that you will have the DMG file), we need to run the installer. The installer makes it very easy to install GPG on the Mac. You should always verify the checksum of the files before you run them just to be sure.

Once you have GPG installed, you can download the rest of the files and start to use GPG.

GnuPG1.4.5GPG_Keychain_Access
GPGDropThing
GPGFielTool
GPGPreferences
GPGMail

The installation of these tools is very straightforward, they are just any other OSX application. Either run the package installer or drag the application into your App folder. The first application we need to run is the GPGkeys. We need to make a pair of keys, one private and one public. It is these keys that gives us the ability to encrypt or digitally sign files, documents and other data.

Making a new Key