I don’t want to go all 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on you, but I’ll say this: I think it’s good to have goals and to work towards your goals.

I like this quote, which I’ve seen attributed to Zig Ziglar:

“Most people fail to reach their goals not because their plans are too simple or too complicated. Most people don’t reach their goals because they’re not committed and willing to follow their plans.”

I think that’s very true. There are so many things I haven’t done because I didn’t follow through on a plan.

What this means for you, loyal reader, is that one of the reasons I’m not accomplishing the goal of writing more for the web site (including a write-up of my trip to Boston for the FSF meeting) is that I’m working towards other goals of learning Python and more about regular expressions.

These two books are great:

• Learning Python, by Mark Lutz
• Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey Friedl

(Not trying to hide anything: These are Amazon Affiliate links. If you buy through them, I’ll make a few pennies!) :-)

I’ve had Mastering Regular Expressions since 2006, and although I started on it with interest then, I eventually set it down and found that a year and a half went by before I began thinking about it again. I received Learning Python in December 2007 as payment for a Free Software Magazine article and started working on it over Christmas vacation, but then it fell by the wayside for a few weeks.

This often happens with technical books. I rarely work all the way through them. Something else comes up and they become relegated to the reference shelf. I also learn a lot by doing and using the Internet to figure things out as I go, but I like following a more structured approach if I can find a good book. It can help with getting a solid introduction and learning some good habits.

I didn’t want to let Python slip away. It was fun. I wanted to keep learning.

A Simple Plan

So I decided on a simple plan. My goal is to get through two pages a day in these two books. I have a calendar printed out that has the months arranged by rows (see: “1 Page Color Landscape”), and I’m marking down my current page numbers at the end of each day.

Two pages a day? That doesn’t sound like much, you might be thinking. I agree, but it’s a plan I may be able to follow. The Python book is 645 pages, and the regex book is 484. I can finish them both in less than a year. If I had followed that plan for MRE in 2006, I would have long ago finished it. (And I can skip some parts, like the .NET chapter in MRE.)

I find that the calendar helps with my motivation. I want to fill in the little squares each day. The other night I had cracked the regex book but not Learning Python, and even though I was tired, I opened it up and read a couple of pages. (It helped that they were descriptive pages and didn’t have examples to be experimented upon.)

And of course, once you get the ball rolling with a plan like this, you end up doing more than two pages a day. Since starting to mark my calendar a week ago, I’ve worked through 50 pages in each book. The key is to make progress every day. (Or very nearly every day.) Keep your head in the material.

It feels good to be accomplishing something. But alas, this kind of focus crowds out other things, like writing here.

The two books tend to complement each other, since I use Python for experimenting with regular expressions. The Python book barely mentions regex, so it’s a good opportunity to poke around in the Python documentation and learn my way around the help system there. I was going to end with a Python function I created today for regex testing, but seeing how long this grew, it’ll wait for another day and its own entry.

Related

• Python: Regex Test Function
• Regex Walk-Through: Match filename base and extension

And I’m back from the FSF meeting at M.I.T. in Cambridge. The trip went well, I enjoyed myself, and will have more to say later.

One of the highlights was meeting Richard Stallman in person. I think he is a great man, and history will recognize him as a hugely important and influential person. No matter that he can be difficult and off-putting in various ways. It was an honor to shake his hand and thank him for what he’s done and is doing for software freedom.

But time is short and I’ll work on posting later when I can. In the meantime, you might enjoy this picture of Boston over the Charles River, taken from the Longfellow Bridge to Cambridge.

2816 x 2112

Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 License.

“Travellin’ and livin’ off the web…”

I have a GPG key, freshly created a couple of days ago. GPG is the GNU Privacy Guard, also known as GnuPG, used for encryption and digital signatures.

Many people include helpful comments about GPG encryption on a page with their public key and fingerprint. Instead of making similar remarks (which I don’t feel qualified to make), I’ll point to some examples: Karl Fogel, Peter S. May, and Henrik Lund Kramshoej.

I’ve read Karl’s page with interest in the past, and revisited it while preparing my own GPG key page. His comments have been influential in adding to my doubts about using the software and keys properly. I found Peter’s and Henrik’s pages recently in Google search results as I’ve been reading about the subject. All three have wise words of caution and advice about using GPG for encryption and digital signing. Peter and Henrik further get in to the concept of the “web of trust” in public key cryptography. Peter’s page is detailed and he appears to be quite conscientious about being a good participant in this web of trust.

(There is also PGP. Both programs implement the OpenPGP standard, but PGP is not free-as-in-freedom so you should use GnuPG.)

So what’s the point of this page?

Well, to refer you to other sources of information, for starters, and to talk about my shiny new key, reasons for creating it, reasons for attending key signing parties, and lay out my rudimentary key signing policy, which I hope will make the case that I intend to be an upstanding cryptizen* and follow good key signing practices.

However, while not a stranger to GPG, I’m pretty new at key signing and web of trust stuff, so my proclamations and methods have to be viewed with skepticism. You can read this post and perhaps draw your own conclusions.

Why a key now?

I haven’t previously had much (if any) personal need for encryption or signing using GPG, but now seemed like a good time to create a key pair before going to the FSF meeting in Cambridge next weekend where I might gather a few signatures.

That might be an answer for “why now?”, but doesn’t really answer the question of why I need a key at all. Why do I want to use GPG? And it suggests another question: Why do I care about getting signatures for my key? I think my primary motivation at the moment is community. Even though I don’t have an immediate need in mind, being trustworthy (at least with respect to my participation in the web of trust) may help me be a better free software community member.

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Well, Cambridge, actually. The Free Software Foundation is holding its Annual Associate Member Meeting at MIT on Saturday, March 15. (You can become a member and go also!) ;-)

I started mulling over the idea of attending last month. It occurred to me I might be able to get a deal on a flight with my paltry 31K NWA miles, and that it would be good to get out and do something different. Being on a weekend, I wouldn’t need to take much time off from work. So, with permission from my patient, gracious, and lovely wife, it all came together.

I’m really looking forward to meeting some free software folks. Are you planning on going? :-) Also keeping my ear out for an informal meetup on Friday night, hopefully near MIT since I’ll be staying in the area and without a car.

Weather permitting, I’ll be walking around Boston on Friday and trying to get a bunch of touristy photos to share here and elsewhere. Recommendations for good photo opportunities are welcome. I’m thinking I’ll start out somewhere in the area of Boston Common and work my way towards my hotel over in Cambridge. Get a good 4-6 miles of walking in. Of course, this is assuming it’s not raining/snowing/freezing that day.

I’m usually not a light packer, but I’m hoping to get everything jammed in to one backpack for ease of travel. I haven’t flown for over two years, which was before all this silliness with the 3-ounce containers and quart-size plastic baggies. Should be… fun. I’ll resist the urge to bleat. “Bahhhh. Yes, sir/ma’am. Yes, I’m so happy to take my shoes off. Bahhhhh. Gee, I feel so safe. I’m not resentful at all of the petty power you hold over me. Bahhhhhhhhhhh.”

Photo Attribution

Thanks to ReneS for sharing “Boston at Night” under a free license: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

I remember in 2000 there was some residual Y2K dread that things might have gone leftwards on February 29th, because of the funny business around years divisible by 100 not being leap years except when divisible by 400. If we would have been a bit faster on the learning curve, that would have created a slightly different flavor to the Y1.9K bug.

Hard to believe this is already the second leap year since 2000.

And here I am like so many other people, posting today for no other reason than to post on a leap day.

I’ll give you three semi-random items:

• Lost is so freaking cool. Great science fiction storytelling on the tube. I loved last night’s episode, “The Constant.”
• I’m this close to booking a flight out to Boston for the FSF annual associate member meeting next month.
• The HDR photo below really caught my eye. I like the colors and the industrial feel. Thanks to heiwa4126 for sharing “Machinery” with a free license: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

This overlaps with the one year stats posted back in July 2007, but I’d like to switch to calendar year accounting, so there you go.

There are some numbers from last year that can serve as the 2006 traffic stats, although they include some traffic from January 2007 since I generated them for the six month anniversary of the site. If you think the 2007 numbers are humble, check out 2006. :-)

Once again, these statistics are provided by Google Analytics.

Visitors

Daily:

On the vertical axis, the middle bar is 500 visitors and the top is 1,000. The jump in February is thanks to Google searches for my “how to” articles about encryption and VNC, and increased image search hits.

Totals:

So, about 400 unique visitors and 600 page views per day.

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