Blogs

I have been experimenting with my personal/test CA recently, since I wanted to try out the extension for Subject Alternative Names and make a Unified Communications Certificate to enable me to use name-based virtual hosts using SSL on a single IP address, something that was well-known to be impossible before.

And here I was, thinking that the ASR-33 Teletype was an amazing piece of hardware... well, it still is, but I just found something that easily wins on the coolness scale. A Rube Goldberg style data storage device that I'd never heard of before: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/27/tob_ibm_1360/.

It's a bit sad that devices like this don't seem to be built anymore. I wonder how much engineering expertise has been lost, just because we now have better, simpler solutions available.

[UPDATE: Microsoft were recently granted patent no 7,571,169, which appears to be fully capable of covering every aspect of XML document representation.

VMware VCenter and OVF Environment properties together give us a great tool to achieve ultra-fast deployment and re-deployment of virtual machines. Since you can easily transport custom properties from the VCenter Settings page all the way into the guest OS, it's very simple to achieve truly low-touch deployment of ready-made templates.

We set up a Windows file share with "append-only" permissions, meaning anyone in the group in question can add files or directories on this share, but not change or delete anything already there. This works, more or less, but with some annoying artifacts - mostly due to the point-and-clickiness of Windows as a file management interface.

For example, creating a new directory is easy enough, but giving it the proper name is a separate operation, which means modifying the directory, which is a no-no.

A followup to End of the threads: My extreme version of Multithreading Mandelbrot turned out to be less than perfect, after all. I experienced frequent deadlocks on other subsets of the Mandelbrot set, forcing me to forcibly reboot the computer. Very bad. I'm not exactly sure what caused those deadlocks but introducing a far better method of taking care of the data generated by the computing threads solved it.

Once again, those lovely people at Microsoft have done it...

I built a cleverly colour-coded table of data using multiple CSS class selectors, only to find that Internet Explorer couldn't handle it. Surprisingly, googling for multiple-class selectors seemed to indicate that it should be fixed from IE7 onwards, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I upgraded to IE8 since this version is supposed to fix all bugs and finally be standards-conformant, but no luck.

What am I doing right? If I google on "java war" right now, one of my pages ends up as hit #8 on the first result page. That is strange in so many ways, especially considering the double or triple meaning of the phrase.

Humans are the only organism that would play-fight for a little plastic puck, creating huge events solely based around this activity, and we're obviously the only ones to even consider creating our own artificial ice surfaces even when it's not naturally freezing outside, just to support these events. Then we build specialized machines solely for the purpose of polishing and improving this artificial ice, and some people spend probably all their working time in the production of such machines. And now I'm watching a show on TV about how they build these machines.

Gluff, the DHCP lease logger, has attracted some unexpected attention by anonymous commenters and since I never thought anyone would find it unless I advertised it, I never bothered to set up the commenting system properly. The results are that I don't know who any of these people are so I can't tell them that a new release of Gluff is now out, with a patch for ISC DHCP 4.1.0, and also that the page has been overflowing with ridiculous SPAM comments in a neverending stream.