Buzz
Archive 2. June 2005
PGP Corporation disrupts PGP Freeware Mirror
Found at rabenhorst: PGP Corporation disrupts PGP Freeware Mirror. I always find it disgusting when I look at what has become of the old PGP project, which has now turned into a commercial mess. PGP was once the pioneer in making usable cryptography available to ordinary citizens—and during the PGP 2 versions, it was indeed openly available (up to version 2.3 under GPL). For exactly this reason, I made the PGP ports to DOS back then. And now the PGP Corporation is lashing out and taking action against free mirrors of the freeware versions. A good example of why it's better to invest energy in projects that belong to companies, but rather in freeware with free as in free speech...
Therefore: use gnupg. The code is also better—I still remember with horror the pseudo-object-oriented code in PGP 5, fixing that stuff was not really entertaining.
By the way, the changelog for the DOS version of PGP 5 (scroll down) was my first weblog, so to speak—and that started as early as October 97. Should I now challenge Dave Winer?
Photon iPhoto Plugin
Photon is a very nice iPhoto plugin that allows you to easily post pictures from iPhoto to a MetaWeblogAPI-compatible blog (e.g. WordPress). The pictures that were just uploaded come from it. Photon uses the image data in iPhoto, so you finally have something to give your pictures titles (with Snail ... I did it wrong - that's why the link is so cryptic). I like the plugin ... What doesn't work quite right again is using it with my own photo blog on hugoesk.de - there I use my own WordPress plugin that manages all the metadata. Let's see if I can hack something together that automatically adds the missing metadata (e.g. EXIF data and photo assignment) from MetaWeblogAPI posts via Photon, or if I will continue to work classically with file export from iPhoto and subsequent upload. By the way, the two uploaded photos were previously RAW images - iPhoto handles the RAWs of the 10D very well. And the new editing window in iPhoto is also quite usable. However, iPhoto has a stupid bug: it only writes reduced EXIF data to the JPG when exporting to disk. The aperture, time, and focal length are included - but the original date is missing. Quite annoying when the target software generates an entry date from it (as hugoesk does). In addition, iPhoto only imports the .CRW files, not the .THM files (which store additional setting data). On the one hand, these data are missing in iPhoto, and on the other hand, memory cards gradually fill up because the .THM files remain and take up space. At least when you use the delete originals option in iPhoto. I definitely have too many photo management systems in use.