I’ve been playing with the commercial PGP Desktop Pro today. Its funny, how for 185ukp its frontend really isn’t as nice as the free Seahorse and the PGP 10 backend isn’t [reportedly] as secure as the opensource GnuPG 2.

They both comply to the OpenPGP standard so I found I could use public/private keys generated on one with the other; and create encrypted/signed files using one tool and decrypt and verify on the other.

I’ve also been doing a lot more work with Nessus scripting lately – writing a lot of NASL plugins and also a parser to convert from the new Nessus 4.2 XML format to an Excel spreadsheet.

The other day I tried to get MS Office 2007 installed under WINE. Well it didn’t go well, eventually I did it (by removing the SP2 files from the installer) but the installed applications wouldn’t start. So I decided to try those Crossover Pro 8 licenses I won. Well all I can say is I’m glad I got them for free not seventy bucks, as even though they did install and run Word 2007 without modification like WINE, the installer screwed up my MIME associations. Plus the de-installer didn’t clean up after itself.

I don’t know how CodeWeavers are making money out of Crossover when the few advantages it has over WINE (GUI config etc.) actually break things that WINE wouldn’t. So I think I’ll stick to unzipping .docx files and opening them in OpenOffice.