mcprogramming.com

Keith Hellman


Table of Contents

Why this Website Sucks
Email Authentication & Privacy
Pretty Good Privacy
S/MIME
Keith Hellman's Resume
PDF Format
Quickbooks to GnuCash
Back in 2004...
My Wishlists Around the Net

Why this Website Sucks

It does doesn't it? The reasons are simple:

  • The "visual candy" stuff is alot of work to create, more to maintain, and never really seems perfect.

  • I've never been fond of "visual candy" in the first place.

Now just so no one thinks I'm simply lazy: I'll point out that mcprogramming is written in DocBook (XML), edited with vim, and built on a FreeBSD box using the gmake, xmllint, and the xmlto package. It would probably still build on a Debian box as well. If you worked with DocBook (XML) processing on a *nix box back in early 2000s (when I started this page), you'll know I can't be that lazy. The XHTML stylesheet is slightly tweaked version of ck-style.css. You can also view the (semi) original XML file, index.xml, with docbook-css-0.4.tar.gz CSS files (your browser may not support this, but it should).

Email Authentication & Privacy

Pretty Good Privacy

My Public Key(s) are also available from key servers (for instance: pool.sks-keyservers.net). On or about the 13 September, 2007, my notebook went AWOL. I've revoked key B5354B76 for this reason.

I use GnuPG, which is compatible with other PGP systems. Beginning in April of 2004, I have begun signing all of my Emails from my mcprogramming.com account, if you receive anything:

  • that is not signed, use your common sense and regard it with as much suspicion as you feel is necessary. If your not sure how much that is, then be safe and discard the message.

  • from kehellman@yahoo.com it is not from me, since I deactivated my yahoo email in mid June 2004.

For now, I'm simply signing Emails so that people can verify that an Email was actually sent by my hand. Too many spammers & spoofers out there for anyone to feel comfortable, IMHO. You can use the PGP signatures on my Emails in several increasingly more secure ways:

  1. Simply knowing that I don't send unsigned Emails, means you can discard that MS Windows Outlook patch I was so kind to forward to you (and if you really knew me, you'd know I'd more likely send a Linux boot CD).

  2. You can install PGP software (did I mention GnuPG?), download my Public Key(s), and verify the signature on my Emails.

  3. Finally, you can do the previous step & verify the key fingerprint with me. Practically speaking, I believe that verifying the signature on a previous Email (from me) would be about the same protection (as long as you knew the Email was from me).

S/MIME

My (Personal) S/MIME Certificate is also available for email correspondance, it's signed through www.cacert.org. Using S/MIME is slightly easier, you simply import my public certificate and trust that www.cacert.org has verified that i am who i am.

My (Mines) S/MIME Certificate is also available for university correspondance.

Keith Hellman's Resume

PDF Format

My Resume is in PDF format. You can obtain a free viewer for the file from Acrobat Reader. I used to compose my resume in OpenOffice.org (which was more than adequate for the task). Lately, however, I use LaTeX for more precise layout control.

A (rather short) CV is available as well.

Quickbooks to GnuCash

Back in 2004...

... I posted to the gnucash-user mailing list about some Python scripts I was working on to convert QuickBooks data to GnuCash. In the end nothing really came of this effort. Development slowed over a summer and by time I looked at it again, I simply didn't see any reason to continue the development.

For anyone interested, here are the pertinent gnucash-user posts (in 'mbox' format) and the python scripts I did develop. Note that these scripts are several years old now, I doubt they will be of much use, and I'm certainly not offering support for them.

My Wishlists Around the Net

  • amazon.com

  • If you can find them, any of these XKCD items:

    • Any of these posters: Online Communities (most recent), Height, Movie Narrative, Gravity Wells, Up Goer Five

    • Citation Needed stickers

    • Formal Logic bumper sticker