[Cryptography Team] New Members

[Bill Schwab]

Ron,

===============================
New Team Members,

I see we have a few new members.  If you feel so inclined please
introduce
yourself and let the team know what areas you are interested in.  This
team
is small so we try to encourage as much participation as possible.

Welcome,
===============================

My interest in Squeak can be summarized in a few words: open, portable,
Smalltalk.  I have long believed that I will eventually need to leave
Windows, and want an escape valve (which must of course involve
Smalltalk); for now, I am not in a hurry.  Having time on my side,
Squeak might be worth some work and some waiting.

So what is missing from or wrong with Squeak?  Good access to SSL is
critical to many uses I envision, and this group will hopefully fill
that void.  I also have some reservations about the user interface, and
suspect that you (Ron) will share at least some of them due to your
focus on medical software.  It would be nice to see some
cleanup/consistency in socket streams.  I am also convinced that Dolphin
and VW are correct to signal errors on stream exhaustion, and would like
to see Squeak do the same.  A fix for underscore snags would be helpful
(more below).  I realize that the focus here is on cryptography, and
moving that forward would be worth the price of admission; it would be
better still to find some like-minded Squeakers who can push for some
other changes that IMHO would be very good for Squeak.

Re Squeak's GUI, the look of the interface is not a big deal to me, nor
are native widgets, but the current feel is a problem.  Clerks enter
data that can be _very_ valuable, and they type; lists grabbing focus on
mouse-over would be complete deal-breaker.  Tabbing between fields is
essential for them to accept software.  Modal dialogs are essential to
keep the majority of my users out of trouble.  Fixing the problems is
not necessarily very difficult; my concern is that once I fix them, I am
on my own unless the required changes are accepted into the base GUI, if
only as options.

Re underscores, the main reason I care about them is interfacing with
relational databases.  I am not a big user of RDBs.  However, when the
goal is to find Robert Smith among hundreds of thousands or more of his
peers, an RDB is the tool of choice.  Field names tend to contain
underscores, and field names become natural choices for selectors in
proxies (if only via DNU).  The recent unicode changes have at least
gotten rid of the errant back arrows in file names, etc.  That's
progress, but I keep hoping for more.

Back to cryptography, (FWIW) I would prioritize OpenSSL over Microsoft
libraries.  Things implemented in Squeak would be nice too, but I have
had good experience with OpenSSL.  My hunch (I could be wrong) is that
C/C++ binaries are preferred for cryptographic number crunching, at
least for the grunt work of processing incoming and outgoing data
streams.  For the occasional public key operation, Smalltalk's ability
to handle large integers is hard to ignore, and performed reasonably
(even surprisingly) well the last time I gave it a try.

Bill



Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bills at anest4.anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029