Living Code

I’m slowly making progress on ZenPaint, a simple animation tool for kids. I started writing it using PyGame, but hit the wall in terms of display, having to redefine my own widgets, etc. So I’ve taken a couple of step back and now I’m working on it using PyObjC. I keep waffling back and forth on whether to use Interface Builder or not. I don’t find Interface Builder very intuitive at all, but maybe I need to buckle down and get good at it. Knowing about nibtool helps–at least I can do text diffs and simple renames from the command-line.

One thing I would like to point out, the Apple NSDocument FAQ is one of the best bits of documentation I’ve ever seen out of Apple. So I’m mentally translating it into Python and trying to apply it to ZenPaint. As soon as I can load and save files reliably I’ll post the program and code up here for comments.

Northern Voices, that is. The local blogging conference is tomorrow and I’ll be there, along with my friend and co-worker, Michael. While I find the idea of a conference about blogging to be a bit odd, it’s a good chance to meet some of the people in person who I only know from blogspace, like Ted and Julie, and a chance to catch up with Tim and Lauren, who I almost never see even though we live in the same town

After much delay, my slides are finally up from the VanPyZ talk last week.

Using Python and Cocoa on OS X

Again I’m using Eric Meyer’s S5 tool for HTML slides, but it still ends up being a large download because it includes a completely unneccesary quicktime movie. My daughter and I have been playing with iStopMotion and this was one of our first forays into claymation.

The reason it’s in the slideshow, is that movie making is now completely accessible to an eight-year-old, and I want to writing games and other programs equally accessible to her.

Still a ways to go…

I’ve gotten a couple of messages asking why there are strange attachments in my email which may or may not prompt you to open your security settings if you try to open them. Fear not, these are not viruses! Rather, it’s the basis of email itself if we ever want to move beyond the ocean of spam we currently swim in.

First some background. When you send an email, by default there are three things which do not occur. The first is Authorization, i.e., there is no guarantee that the person you are sending the mail to is able to read it. The second is Encryption, which ensures that other people are not able to read it. The third is Authentication, proving that the mail which appears to be from me, actually is from me. None of these are present in normal email.

In fact, sending an email without these is like putting all of your standard (snail) mail on postcards, then having the postcards travel through the houses of random strangers until they (possibly) end up at their destination. Adding authentication, authorization, and encryption is like putting your email in an envelope.

So that is what the obscure attachment is in my email, it’s a digital signature, which provides some form of authentication (better than nothing). I recieved this certificate from a company called Thawte, for free, and installed it in my primary email application, Mail.app. There are very good instructions for doing this at http://www.joar.com/certificates/. Once you have installed the certificate, signing your mail happens authomatically and transparently. The process of getting the certificate could be easier, but it’s certainly not difficult.

The real benefit happens when more people start doing this. See, if I have received mail from someone who also uses digital signatures, then Mail.app remembers this, and when I respond it uses their signature and my signature in combination to get the rest of the picture: Authorization and Encryption. If we can get to the point where the standard is to put messages in an envelope instead of postcards, it makes much better tools for eliminating spam available–don’t accept mail unless it is from a verifiable source. It’s not perfect, but a big improvement over the situation we have today.