The pain of encryption
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Well, I just had a rather annoying adventure with attempting to use PGP encryption stuff on my e-mail. I found a plugin/module thing for Mozilla that would supposedly use GnuPG to encrypt or sign my emails and also decrypt or verify incoming emails. Key word: “supposedly”. As it turns out, there’s virtually no way to find public PGP keys on the web, so I never managed to verify anything, and the whole thing seemed pretty shoddy, so I removed it. I might try again sometime, but not anytime soon. That’s the problem with open-source stuff… it usually sounds great and has a lot of neat ideas, but all too often it turns out to be in perpetual beta and doesn’t do a damned thing. Also, it appears the Jabber server I use is down; Jabber is (surprise!) an open-source instant messaging system that fakes interoperability with AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo instant messaging systems that kicks ass when it works but breaks far more often than the proprietary systems. It’s really annoying how the more open-source a program is, the less reliably it works.
Oh well, I have one of my two exams tomorrow… this first one is English 12, oh boy. The next one—Regents Physics—is on Tuesday (the 18th). After these two exams, I’m finally done with high school! W00T!